


Rites of Spring

by ArtDeco



Category: The Halcyon (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Combat Stress, First World War AU, M/M, Mutual Pining, Secret Relationship, Slow Burn, Trench Warfare, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 30,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28016874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArtDeco/pseuds/ArtDeco
Summary: 'The other four were set-faced, awaiting dismissal, but this boy – Joshi – was smiling at him. Not insolently, as though he was plotting how he might cause Toby trouble; just a small, friendly smile, like a greeting, something shared.'Ypres, 1917. Captain Toby Hamilton learns all is fair in Love and War.
Relationships: Toby Hamilton/Adil Joshi
Comments: 8
Kudos: 11





	1. The Adoration

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With thanks to Lucy_Ferrier, LadyBeloe and AstriferousSprite for encouraging me to expand this AU.
> 
> Disclaimer that the Royal Leicestershires and East Surreys were both real British Army regiments (since disbanded), but although the below does reference real battles and troop movements of the First World War, any similarities with the real-life Royal Leicestershires and East Surreys is entirely coincidental.
> 
> Content notes: references to death and violence (non-graphic); period-typical racism; references to parental abuse; references to school bullying; alcohol dependency; combat stress, including loss of appetite as a symptom; and internalised ableism.
> 
> Happy ending guaranteed!

* * *

**I.**

“You’re better off sleeping in here,” Captain Wayman said. “These are the best beds. Who’s your second?”

“Lieutenant Woodward.”

“Good old Woody. I’d have him in here with you and put the kiddies through there.” He pointed with his swagger-stick to a dark mouth in the earth wall. “More rats in there. They go for your toes in the night. Or so I’m told. Disappointing weather, isn’t it? More like March than May.”

“What about the wire?”

“Oh, you’re all boxed in, nice and snug. As to Jerry’s, I couldn’t tell you. I never send out patrols if I can help it. Gets his back up. Well.” He held out his hand. “Good luck to you. Keep those feet dry.”

Toby shook it. “You’ve a bit of leave, haven’t you?”

“A week. My boy’s got his half-term. Wants to go to the zoo.” Wayman swung his pack over his shoulders and began hauling himself up the ladder. “See if you can finish ‘em off before I get back.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Wayman staggered upright in the trench, waved his stick, then let the curtain fall back.

Toby sat down at the table. The candle, stuck in the bottle with its own grease, was dripping onto the logbook. He touched the pool of wax, and his finger sank through the thin film that had formed on the surface. It was hot, not like oil, like a bath. Another drip landed on the back of his hand. It burned for a second, two, then the skin beneath began to feel itchy and warm. When he tilted his wrist, so the wax might dribble away, there was a pink mark. He turned his hand over to let a drip fall on his palm. It stung more there, burned less. He wanted to close his hand around the hot glass of the bottle, to see how long he could stand it. At prep school, when he’d beaten Robert Kingsley-Browne to top marks in the end-of-year Mathematics paper, Robert had held his bare arm against the hot water pipes in the dormitory and told him if he screamed, he’d press his mouth there next. The skin had come away brownish-red and blistered, and he’d had to keep his jumper on for the first half of the summer holidays. Jeremy Atcliffe had said it was what Robert’s father did to his mother when she made him angry; and he’d spent Easter with Robert, so he ought to know. Jeremy was dead now, blown up at St Eloi. He didn’t know about Robert.

He’d inherited a quiet section of the line, by the look of the logbook. Wayman seemed to have had more luck shooting rats than Germans. Funny to think of him with a school-age kid, stumping around a zoo in his cap and spurs. He was the sort who’d lift his boy onto his shoulders so he could see over the crowds. His wife was probably young and sturdy, very capable, and clever enough to let Wayman think that all her good ideas were his own.

Toby studied the map, wrinkled where someone had got it wet and the ink had run. The battalion, all eight hundred men, quartered between A, B, C and D companies, were being squeezed into two hundred and fifty yards of the front line. Four machine-gun nests scraped into the high ground behind the trench; sentry-posts; the gas warning-bell; a brake of rusting wire beyond the parapet, glinting steel as the sun dipped. All tucked in on either side by other battalions from other regiments, each counting down the seven days until their turn at the base behind the lines.

The dugout wasn’t in bad shape. He’d had some where the chicken-wire sank so low on the bed-frames that one had to hang one’s arms and legs over the sides to keep off the floor. There were five upturned crates around the table, and a segment of what had once been a huge mirror resting against a wall, the jagged edge sanded down. A sad little collection of postcards had been tacked up – Brighton Pier, Lake Windermere, Clifton Suspension Bridge, Big Ben, ponies on Dartmoor, and the obligatory magazine cuttings of coy-looking girls with pale, meaty legs and pale, meaty chests. One was draped in nothing but a Union Jack, with the caption: _She’ll be ever so grateful when you come back…_

“Alright to come down, sir?”

A burly, grey-haired private climbed down the ladder, and someone behind the curtain lowered down the mess box, then the crate with the two stoves.

“I’m sorry to come down this way, sir, only it’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta in that tunnel.”

“What have you got for us tonight, Robbie?”

Robbie hoisted the mess box under one arm, the crate under the other. “Soup, then a bit o’ steak, then rice pudding. I’ll get setting up now, sir, if it’s all the same?”

He disappeared into the tunnel off the main dugout where the servants slept, where he could light the stoves out of the draught. How they’d cadged the Savoy’s sous-chef as officers’ cook...

Toby looked back at the map. There could only be a hundred yards between here and the German front line. There’d be another of him directly opposite, also sore-eyed and sore-footed, studying his own machine-gun nests and sentry posts and gas warning-bell, worrying about his own wire, hungry for his own dinner. He’d speak better English than Toby could speak German. Overhead, the shuffling of hundreds of feet and the thump of heavy packs on duckboards as the men were settled. The men respected Toby, trusted him, perhaps even liked him, in the distant sort of way one likes that quiet friend of one’s parents who never demands to be hugged; but when they moved up the line they were best left to Green, company sergeant-major, who was sharp-eyed and diplomatic, and would smooth out their grievances while the tea brewed. Toby led the men, rubbed whale-oil into their blistered feet, fussed over their kit like a mother, but he’d never been responsible for anyone until he’d joined the Army, and the weight of two hundred lives, not only under his command but under his care, pressed heavy on his neck.

“How do, skipper?” asked Woody, dropping down the ladder and taking off his helmet, shaking his head like a dog coming out of water. He was a tall, fair-haired boy of twenty-five, with a bright gold wedding-band from his last leave.

“The kiddies are coming now. Wanted to check their chaps were settled, bless their hearts. I told them to leave them to their char.”

“Wayman said the best beds are in here. Why not have Netherby with you and I’ll sleep through there with Gower and Langham? If we don’t split them up, we’ll never get a moment’s peace.”

“You’d better stay out here, if the beds are better.”

Toby shook his head. The endless swing of the curtain, the drip of wax on the table, the candlelight bouncing off the mirror… He needed somewhere dark and quiet to lie down and smoke and imagine, masochistically, like picking at a scab, where he’d be now if he hadn’t chucked his final year at Oxford at Kitchener’s call. He’d have missed Loos. His first action. But then he might’ve ended up at the Somme, where the German gunners had been told to pick out the officers by the bony shape of their knees.

“It’s ten to seven. Will you go on duty now, and I’ll send Netherby up to relieve you at nine? We’ll keep your dinner. Then you can go on again at five after stand-to.”

“I’ll just have a bit of something to keep me going,” Woody said, going into the tunnel. “By the way, Green says the new chaps are coming up with the artillery. Should arrive in an hour or so.”

“Ask him to make sure they have something to eat, then to bring them down here at nine. I’d like to get the measure of them.”

Woody reappeared with the heel of a loaf spread with jam. “Back on the merry-go-round,” he said cheerfully, and climbed up into the trench, helmet swinging from the crook of his elbow.

He would put Langham on at eleven, Gower on at three, and himself on at one, the darkest part of the night, when the Boche, who surely knew their habits by now, might think about trying something on their new neighbours. Then two snatched hours of sleep before stand-to. He’d censor letters before breakfast. Rifle inspection at eight. Back on duty at eleven. Lunch. More letters. Inspect trench stores. Dinner. On duty at nine. Then another few hours’ sleep before another stand-to. The mindless drudgery of it, huddled deep in their bolt-holes like moles in a frost. One almost wished for a German raid, or to be sent out on patrol, just to feel one’s blood up. He would send out a wiring party tomorrow night. Nice and snug, the officer being relieved always promised, eager to get away; then you’d wake up to Jerry skipping merrily through the gaps in your wire, grenades in hand, and _you_ ’d be the one to get stick from the brigadier about improper trench maintenance.

At dinner, Toby watched the wax run down the side of the bottle and onto the newspaper Robbie had laid as a cloth. They were an unusually young company of officers, the three subalterns all nineteen, first time out. They ate quietly, and Toby felt like a housemaster intruding on a boys’ picnic. He offered out cigarettes. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Three polite voices. He declined his rice pudding. Netherby went up to relieve Woody, and Robbie brought out the first bottle of whisky. Toby put two capfuls into his coffee, and when the coffee was drunk he had a whisky with water, and when Gower and Langham went to lie down he poured it neat to halfway up his mug. He forced himself to sip at it. The others hadn’t touched it. They would know it was him if they came back and saw half the bottle had gone.

Cold air licked his face. Green was holding back the curtain, like Alice peering down the rabbit-hole.

“I’ve brought the new men, sir.”

Behind him Toby could see a cluster of bodies, faceless in the dusk, legs and arms and chests bleeding into a single khaki hump rising out of the earth. They climbed down carefully, first Green, then the five new fellows, then Woody at the rear, and when Green had them lined up and saluting, Toby saw how young they were. He was glad the mug was enamel, so they couldn’t see how much he’d poured.

“At ease,” he said, and they relaxed, taking off their helmets, and without the shadow of the metal brims he could see their eyes, the whites very bright in the candlelight.

“Thank you for coming down,” he said. They were looking directly into his face, to show him they were listening. “I’m Captain Hamilton, commanding officer of C Company, and this is my second-in-command, Lieutenant Woodward.”

“We met on the way down,” Woody said, smiling easily at them. He came to stand beside Toby, and Toby wished he’d go and get his dinner, because they were sure to be looking between the two of them and wondering how on earth Toby had been put in command over him.

“The other officers in this company are Second Lieutenants Gower, Langham and Netherby, who you’ll meet tomorrow. Now, I’m told you’re joining us from the Fifth Battalion, East Surreys.”

“What’s left of it, sir.”

The East Surreys had had a bad time of it. They’d been marooned at the Somme for the winter, facing snow, ice and freezing fog in waterlogged trenches, being picked off man by man by snipers. Now the regiment was being carved up and divided between other units, handfuls of survivors dropped piecemeal along the Salient.

“Well, now you’re part of the Second Battalion, Royal Leicestershires, and we’re very glad to have you,” Toby said. He hoped he looked it. “Gill and O’Brien, you’re joining Mr Woodward’s platoon, and Hill, Joshi and Taylor, you’ll be joining mine.”

He looked up from the list of names. There was an Indian chap at the end of the line around his own age, perhaps a year or two older. The other four were set-faced, awaiting dismissal, but this boy – Joshi – was smiling at him. Not insolently, as though he was plotting how he might cause Toby trouble; just a small, friendly smile, like a greeting, something shared. His dark hair was combed back tidily from his forehead, glassy like light through water.

“Have they had something to eat, sergeant-major?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well,” he said, fumbling for his cigarette case, “take a smoke, each of you, and I’ll see you in the morning. If there’s anything you need tonight, just ask the sergeant-major or Corporal Feldman.”

“Nice bunch, I thought,” Woody said once they’d gone. “Green seemed happy enough with them.”

Toby sat down and took a gulp of whisky. “Christ, I feel such a fool when I talk to them down here. I’m alright when I’m inspecting their feet or their rifles and I don’t have to look them in the eye.”

“I’ll never know why you didn’t accept the adjutant job. Sat behind the lines doing paperwork, complaining about incompetence? That’s you to a tee. I’ll bet the brigadier was spitting feathers when you turned it down.”

“Couldn’t leave you in charge, could I? The company would be wiped out within the week.”

Toby pulled the ammunition lists towards him, the tiny lights in the whisky bottle winking at him across the table.

**II.**

He worked until eleven, when he sent Langham up to relieve Netherby, who fell asleep in the best bed without taking off his boots. Toby woke at midnight with his head on the table and a stiff neck, the candle burnt low in the bottle. At ten to one, he put on his gloves, greatcoat and helmet, holstered his revolver, and climbed up into the frigid night. A sliver of moon hung over No Man’s Land, ice-white and detached, taking neither side, and Toby groped along the trench, guided by the pinpricks of lit cigarettes, blinking slow and amber like eyes within the trench walls.

“Anything to report?” he asked Langham, who shook his head, yawning.

“A plane went over ‘bout half an hour ago, but I couldn’t see whether it was theirs or ours.”

Toby had a cigarette, then walked from sentry to sentry, staring out with them at the barren ground. It was easier in the dark. In the nursery he’d had a night-light, until his father had found out and taken it away; but now he preferred the night, when no-one could see his face as he spoke to them.

Gower took over at three, when the horizon was just beginning to lighten. Toby filled in the logbook and fell asleep at the table again, until the shout of _sta_ _nd-to!_ dragged the others out of bed and up into the trench, watching the pink sky spoiling in the dawn. He never dreamt in the line. Their sleep was too shallow.

He was starting on his bacon when they heard the whine of the first shell.

“It’ll fall short,” Gower said, but they felt the impact right above their heads, shrapnel clattering on the ladder. Earth fell from the ceiling into the jam. A moment’s quiet, like an indrawn breath, and Toby pictured them all picking themselves up, patting down limbs, checking for their mates. Then the call for stretcher-bearers.

“Christ,” he said, pushing away his plate, “can’t even have breakfast in peace anymore. There was a time when Jerry wouldn’t dream of starting anything until we’d had our coffee.”

In the trench, two men were being lifted onto stretchers, another having his hand bandaged roughly.

“Whyte and Mackay both hit, sir,” Green said, “and Atherton’s had a nasty slice to the hand. Better send him down too, sir, in case it gets infected.”

Whyte was losing blood from his leg, but he managed to smile, white-lipped, when Toby came over. Mackay was half-conscious; a stretcher-bearer was pressing a pad against his stomach.

“Will he be alright?” Toby asked him.

“Depends how quick we can get ‘im to casualty clearing, sir. The roads are in bad nick.”

“Bad luck,” Woody said. “I liked Mackay.”

Toby had liked Mackay too. He was a steady sort of fellow, married twenty years, eight children, a postman in peacetime. He’d been Toby’s soldier-servant, chatty in the way of those who don’t expect to be listened to, sharing the battalion gossip as he brushed down Toby’s uniform and polished his boots. His oldest son was seventeen. Mackay had said he’d put in for the Navy.

“Who will you ask?”

“Give him a chance; he might be back next week.”

But Toby knew he wouldn’t be. He moved to look closer at the damage to the wall, when he saw Joshi watching him. Stubble was shadowing his jaw.

Joshi saluted smartly. “Do you know where I can shave, sir?”

“I believe the men have a bit of mirror rigged up by the latrines.”

Toby smiled, in what he hoped was a ‘carry on’ sort of way, and picked up a shovel by the mouth of the dugout. He began to press earth back into the pitted wall.

“We’ll do that, sir,” Joshi said.

Toby whacked at a protruding piece of shrapnel. “I’ve nothing else to do. Dirt got into my breakfast.”

Joshi picked up another shovel. “I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”

“There’s nothing worse – than dirt – in your breakfast.”

When they stood back, the wall was still a little concave.

“I’ll speak to the sergeant-major about getting some struts to reinforce it,” Toby said. “Thank you for your help, Joshi. You’d better get your shave now before rifle inspection.”

Joshi took the shovel from him, smiling that small, friendly smile.

Robbie had made fresh coffee, and Toby splashed in a capful of whisky, to toast Mackay. He had to give Taylor, one of his new men, a telling-off for having mud in the barrel of his rifle, and several bayonets were beginning to rust and couldn’t be properly fixed.

“Leave it with me, sir,” Green said. “Corporal Feldman will have a word with the quartermaster.”

It started to rain when Toby went on duty at eleven, and for two hours he paced up and down C Company’s sixty yards of the line, unable to hear anything over the thunking of raindrops on his tin helmet. He couldn’t even smoke. After lunch, they sat around the table censoring stacks of letters, barely reading, just scanning for dates, locations, troop movements.

“I think Mitcham’s wife’s expecting again,” Woody said. “Must’ve enjoyed his leave.”

In the trench stores, the spare wooden struts were rotting, and a box of Mills bombs had been left marked _DUD_. There were nineteen spare boots – six left, thirteen right – and a huge rats’ nest built into a tarpaulin, dozens of sleek, grunting babies wriggling blindly over each other. He left Feldman to deal with it.

Green was getting volunteers for the wiring party. Toby had asked for seven men, with Langham to lead them. They would crawl along on their bellies after dark, faces and necks smeared with boot polish or burnt cork, freezing whenever a flare went up, checking their wire hadn’t been cut, repairing any damage. They would be out all night. A filthy job, but Toby hadn’t minded it when he was a junior. Better than lying awake, as he did now, waiting to hear they were all back. He had a whisky with dinner, and another to keep out the cold. They were onto the second bottle.

The rain had cleared when he went back on duty, and he stood on the fire-step and breathed in the dark, pepper smell of damp earth. A hundred yards over, he could see tiny plumes of smoke as the Germans made coffee, heated their dinner. He could send the map references back to the heavy artillery. Extinguish each little fire and its lighter. He imagined his German other, watching the smoke of Toby’s cigarette curling above the parapet, wondering whether he was worth the bullet. He raised his face to the iron sky.

“Don’t let the sergeant-major catch you up there, sir.”

Joshi was smiling at him from underneath his helmet. He was very clean. Even his puttees had had the mud brushed from them.

“Have he and Corporal Feldman been looking after you?” Toby asked, climbing down from the fire-step and sitting on it.

“Yes, thank you, sir.”

The trench wall was cold and wet against his back. He took out his cigarette case.

“Have a smoke?”

“No, thank you, sir. I don’t, as a rule.”

Toby looked back at the sky. “Lieutenant Woodward thinks it’ll rain again tonight. The man’s a human barometer. Pity you aren’t in his platoon. His fellows are always all-weather-ready.”

“I’m happy where I am, sir.”

“How long were you with the East Surreys?”

“From last spring until a few weeks ago, sir.”

A conscript then. What a blooding for him, a year at the Somme.

“It must be strange to take on new colours.”

“I’ve never been to Surrey and I’ve never been to Leicestershire, so if you don’t mind my saying, sir, it’s as broad as it’s long to me. It’s the people you miss.”

Toby turned his head, so as not to blow smoke in Joshi’s face.

“The Leicestershires weren’t at the Somme. We were marched around with the Australians, springing attacks while they thought Jerry was busy with you. Boar’s Head. Fromelles. The poor Aussies were annihilated. Daylight advance, outnumbered two to one, enemy fire into both flanks. Murder.”

Joshi looked very relaxed, standing loosely in the centre of the duckboards. He’d pushed the brim of his helmet up so it sat on the back of his head, like a child’s straw hat at the seaside.

“Have you been out long, sir?”

“Two years next month.”

“Your family must be very proud.”

“My brother’s in the Royal Flying Corps. I don’t think they’ve much pride left over for me.”

“Older or younger?”

“Older.” Toby flicked his cigarette stub over the parapet. “By four minutes.”

“Are you identical?”

“Lucky for him, no.”

“My brother’s desperate to come out. He worries it’ll be over before he’s old enough.”

One could only admire Joshi’s brother’s optimism.

“Still at school, is he?”

“He works at Gamages, in the loading bay.”

“Were you there with him? Before all this.”

“I’m a barman. At The Victoria in Paddington.” He smiled. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever been?”

Toby knew he was being teased, and found he didn’t mind. “As a matter of fact, there was a pub we’d sometimes go to in Oxford. Penny a pint. _Vile_. More watered-down than that swill they serve in Amiens.”

“ _I_ ’ve never watered down a pint, I promise you.”

“No. I don’t believe you would.”

Further down the line, a shell arced over No Man’s Land, whizzing like an overwound clock. They watched it drop just behind the trench, in the stretch of exposed ground between the front line and reserve trenches, where they sometimes buried the dead. Toby felt his neck dip instinctively.

“Better put that helmet on properly,” he said to Joshi. He got up woodenly from the fire-step, brushing down his breeches.

“I wonder – ” he began, feeling absurdly like he was asking a girl to the May Ball, twisting his signet ring beneath his fingers – “my batman, Mackay, was one of the chaps hit this morning. I don’t suppose you’d like to take over?”

“I’ve never done it before, sir.”

“I won’t give you much trouble. I usually fend for myself in the line, unless the brigadier drops by and I need smartening up. It’s really just giving everything a brush and polish when we’re at the base. You’d get a bed down in the tunnel when we’re in the line. And you’d be welcome to the odd whisky and any rations going spare.”

“Isn’t there someone more experienced you’d rather ask, sir?”

“To be honest, I’d like someone my own age for once.”

He’d had enough of being fathered by the old professionals. The child in him had died at Loos.

“Well,” Joshi said, “if you’re sure, sir. Thank you very much.”

“You can move your kit down after stand-to.” He realised he was smiling; stiffly, as though his face had forgotten how to do it. “Come through and see me after breakfast and we’ll go through everything. You can start properly once we’re back at the base.”

They said goodnight, and Toby climbed back up onto the fire-step – though Green really would be cross if he found him there – and waited to see the wiring party safely out, the sandbags on the parapet glittering with the damp.

**III.**

On Sunday afternoon, Toby handed over to the relieving officer, and the battalion marched along the Menin Road like a line of harvester ants, bowed beneath their packs. A fleet of double-decker London buses waited for them at Ypres, the foundations of the razed Cloth Hall bared like toothless gums. Toby saw his men onto the 453 to Marylebone and sat at the front with Green, jolted awake whenever they drove over a shell-hole and his head was knocked against the window.

At the base, lines of canvas tents stretched like mole-hills across the field, dense and squat and weather-stained. They piled off the bus beside A, B and D companies, swinging their kit, craning their necks, boys on a school outing. Guides came up and began to lead the men away, calling out platoon numbers.

“Make sure they get some dinner,” Toby said to Green, “and give them the day off tomorrow. I’m going to ride over to battalion HQ in the morning, see the quartermaster about those bayonets.”

Another guide took him to the mess – _The Savoy Grill_ stencilled in white on the door – where officers from the Third Battalion were already eating, bent low over their plates. Toby had some bread and butter, and bought Woody and the juniors each a brandy, and took his own outside while he smoked, standing close to the wall, watching more buses bringing more men from further up the line. He stared into the headlamps as they idled, so when they drove away the field was fuzzy and silver-streaked, as though he’d looked too long at a flare. When he went back inside, the juniors had gone to bed. He had another brandy with Woody, and when Woody went to bed he had a whisky with the commander of B company, and two more whiskies when the commanders of A and D companies joined them, then half the bottle of wine the mess sergeant said was about to turn, and would the gentlemen like it before he poured it away, no charge. Someone sat down at the piano, and some of the others began to sing, loudly and cheerily with threadbare smiles. He was very hungry. He felt sick from too many cigarettes.

The guide had told him he was the third hut down from the mess. He walked slowly along the path in the dark. If he didn’t concentrate, he would stray into the field of tents and trip over a guy rope. He got out his lighter and held it up, so he could count. It shook in his hands.

Number three was a few paces ahead, a windowless wooden structure like a garden shed. The huts had flat rooves, which meant in wet weather the water built up and streaked down the inside of the walls, drip drip drip onto the blankets.

The door wouldn’t open all the way. Toby kept pushing it, and it kept banging against something hard and bouncing back. Someone had left the light on. It stung his eyes. The banging noise was very loud.

“Captain Hamilton?”

Toby opened his eyes. Joshi was inside the room, holding the door halfway open.

“It won’t open any further, sir. The bed’s too big. I’ll hold it while you come through.”

Joshi stepped back. Toby hadn’t quite understood what Joshi had told him, but he had said to come through, so he shuffled along the narrow channel between the door and the doorframe. The room, lit by a naked bulb, was mostly taken up by an iron bedstead. There was an upturned crate for a bedside table, and Joshi had placed his mug, toothbrush and shaving kit there, and his pile of books. Toby wondered whether he’d looked for the framed photograph of the wife or girlfriend; or, like Major Pearson, a folding frame with both, staring across prettily at one another, frozen in ignorance.

“I wasn’t sure what else to unpack, sir.” He looked exhausted.

“I didn’t expect you tonight. I’ve kept you up very late.”

“I wanted to see whether there was anything you needed.”

“You should have gone to bed.”

The buttons of his tunic were thick and ridged. He couldn’t seem to force them through their holes. His fingers wouldn’t keep their grip.

“Very stiff, those, aren’t they, sir.” Joshi stepped up to him and undid the button at his throat. “Especially with cold hands.”

Toby’s hands hung uselessly at his sides as Joshi worked through the buttons. He unbuckled his belt and moved behind him to pull the tunic down his arms. His shirt was filthy, a month worn, and would stink as foully as the rest of him. But at least they all stank together, officers and men, the Great Unwashed, and the accustomed nose soon lost the handicap of noticing it. Toby hated being dirty. Untidiness could be cultivated, something louche and unaffected, something with which to provoke his father; but dirtiness made it difficult to _feel_ like a commanding officer, especially with Joshi looking so combed and unspoiled, the bloody model of the proper soldier.

“Could you sit on the edge of the bed please, sir?”

The mattress flattened silently under his weight, springs gone. Joshi began to unlace his boots. Toby wanted to rest his hand on the top of his head, feel the warmth of his hair.

“Did they feed you?”

“Yes, thank you, sir. We’re being well looked after.”

Joshi straightened up with the boots, draping the tunic over his arm. “I’ll have a go at these in the morning, sir, and bring them back to you.” He smiled. “Goodnight, sir.”

He left before Toby could find the tip.

***

When Joshi woke him at eight with a mug of tea, Toby’s head was throbbing.

“Could we have that light off,” he said hoarsely. Joshi turned it off and placed the brushed tunic, the clean shirt from Toby’s pack, and the polished boots and belt at the end of the bed.

“The sergeant-major mentioned you were going riding this morning, sir,” he said, picking up Toby’s breeches from the floor, “so I’ve been down to the stables and they’re saddling up Colonel Bartlett’s horse for you.”

Toby forced down the tea. It was black, laced with sugar. He hadn’t slept well at all. He’d kept jolting awake, thinking he was late to go on duty. He felt as though his skin was being stretched tight over his skull.

“You’re very industrious. I’m not sure I’m worth all your efforts.”

“Surely it’s for me to be the judge of that, sir.”

Toby looked away. Joshi had seen him in a bad way last night, yet he’d helped him to bed like a drowsy child; he hadn’t taken a tip; he’d gone out of his way to sort him a horse this morning; and apparently all while thinking Toby was worth the bother. If it was his lance corporal stripes he was after, he was certainly putting the hours in. How easy it would be to get used to feeling looked after, to thinking that smile meant Joshi really was pleased to see him.

“I shan’t bother with breakfast,” Toby said, easing himself out of bed. “If I go to the mess I’ll talk myself out of going and waste your early start.”

He dismissed Joshi, dressed, and went to the officers’ wash-tent for a shave. When he came back, there was another mug of tea and a plate of bacon and buttered toast on the bedside crate.

At the stables at the edge of the camp, the colonel’s chestnut mare, Enable, was being led around the yard. The lad gave him directions to battalion headquarters and Toby rode out of the base, away from the Menin Road and the rattling buses. The land was so flat that when he looked over his shoulder, half a mile on, he could still see the shapes of the camp, flecked black on the horizon.

His head sweated beneath his cap. This far behind the lines the countryside was, for now, undesecrated. Farmhands were tilling the ground; a child rode a bicycle on the path; women were hanging out washing, their skirts dark, curtains drawn across their cottage windows. A white cat lay stretched on a wall, belly turned to the sun. The trees were still trees, not blackened stumps, hacked branches pointing to the sky accusingly like scorched fingers. He crossed a field dense with wheat, whispering like turning pages as it brushed the mare’s barrel, and in his man-made, battle-stained uniform, Toby felt he was despoiling a pastoral idyll, or else the model for a propaganda poster: _Protect our green and pleasant land. Join the Army today!_ They could be across the Channel in Suffolk. Yet it was unsettling to be in the open after three weeks in the ground, and he rode with his revolver on the cord of his tunic, the weight damp in his palm.

Battalion headquarters was an abandoned château, a slender, white-stone building on raised foundations, being delicately throttled by glossy ivy ropes. Several windows had been boarded over, and the elegant slopes of roof were shedding their tiles. She reminded Toby of an old dowager, self-righteous in decay, fingers being prised window by window, tile by tile from their grip on the old world, when war was fought in distant lands against savages and coloureds, hand-to-hand, until the cavalry, hooves stamping, nostrils flaring, bayonets glinting in a foreign sun, slew them all in a final, glorious charge.

A soldier-servant took Enable to the water-trough, and Toby was shown to the quartermaster’s stores, below ground in what might once have been the servants’ hall. The quartermaster, Captain Friar, had a pallor from working so long underground.

“You needn’t have come,” he said, tapping a page in his logbook. “Your Corporal Feldman got me on the field-telephone. I’ll have a despatch rider bring the bayonets over before you move off on Sunday.”

“I wouldn’t mind a few spares. The trench stores in this part of the line are a disgrace. Everything’s been allowed to get wet and rot over the winter. I’ve made you a list of what was dud or missing.”

“Aren’t you a workhorse.”

“And I wondered whether you might put an additional bottle of whisky in our mess box next time.” Toby pressed the list into Friar’s hand. “Our cook’s from the Savoy, and there’s never any left to drink once he’s flambéd every dish.”

Friar winked. “You scratch my back, eh?”

“No, I – ”

“Oh, cheer up. You can have your extra whisky. Christ knows I can’t begrudge you it.”

Toby signed the chit, and Friar walked him out, skin glaring even whiter against the greying stone.

“I’ll tell the brigadier I’ve seen you,” he said. “I must say we were all surprised you didn’t take the adjutant job.”

“It wasn’t the right time.”

“You _are_ a strange fish. Most chaps would give a limb to be here. Proper bed. Hot baths. The fellow we got instead is a real drip. Brigadier can’t stand him. I don’t think he’ll last long.”

The soldier-servant led Enable over. Toby smoothed her nose, cool and wet from the trough.

“Would you take it if he asks you again?”

“I wouldn’t want to leave Woody in the lurch.”

“You’re a glutton for punishment, Hamilton.” Friar patted Enable’s flank. “You’ve done your bit. More than. Let someone else take their turn. Don’t push your luck.”

The sun was high as he rode back. Would he be asked again? Could he refuse a second time? Chief aide to the brigadier, head of battalion administration. Liaison. Figures. Paperwork. Safe and warm behind the lines. It would be easier to say no if he thought he’d be hopeless at it, but Woody had been right: it was him to a tee. Summer was nearing. He could sit in the château grounds and read his books. Gin with ice. Clean shirt and underwear. The booming of the guns distant and lulling, like the hum of thunder before the rain.

His hut would be sweltering. There was nowhere to sit outside that was out of sight of the men; and one always ought to _look_ on duty in front of them. A morning like this at school, after exams, he and four others had been caned for going swimming in Jubilee River. It had been so hot in the prefects’ common room that he’d felt a bead of sweat drip from Ratcliffe’s face onto the back of his neck. Ratcliffe was all talk. Lacked the guts to draw blood like the other prefects could. Toby had had worse from his father when he’d still been in short trousers. The next warm morning he’d gone back to the river, alone, and Ratcliffe, when he’d seen his wet hair, had said nothing.

In the airless hut, a large, square package had been placed on his bed, wrapped in dark green paper, bound with gold ribbon. A parcel from Harrods. Toby peeled off his tunic, rubbing his sweaty hands on his breeches. Parcels out here were better than birthdays or Christmas at home; everything could be unwrapped and examined in its own time, without having to arrange one’s face to look suitably grateful. Beneath the lid, on folds of crêpe paper, was a note.

_Darling,_

_A few treats for you and your friends. I hope you’re being a good boy and getting lots of sleep and plenty to eat. If there’s anything else you want, just write and I’ll send it straight away. I’ve just received a long letter from Freddie, so I expect one from you very soon. Your father sends his best._

_Love,  
Mother_

There were three pairs of woollen khaki socks, reinforced at the heels and toes. There was a new uniform shirt, with his name on a tag stitched into the collar. There was a clean vest and a clean pair of long johns. There was a fruitcake, and a jar of boiled sweets, and a tin of powder for cocoa. There was a packet of new pencils. There was a tin of Globe brass polish, and a bar of Pears soap, and zinc cream for his mouth, and a packet of safety razors, and spare bootlaces. There were thirty packets of cigarettes and three boxes of matches and bars and bars and bars of chocolate. There was Siegfried Sassoon’s new book of poems wrapped in tissue paper. And at the bottom of the box, a large bottle of Irish whiskey.

Toby ate a bar of chocolate, sucking it from his fingers as it melted. Mother had outdone herself. The RFC were given more leave than the infantry; she wouldn’t send Freddie parcels as grand as this. He supposed she spoiled him in person. Toby preferred parcels. They were more useful than being fussed with.

He’d left the door open to tempt in some air, and at the knock he turned and saw Joshi squeezing through the gap.

“Message from the brigadier for you, sir.”

“Sometimes,” Toby said once he’d read the note, crushing it into his pocket, “I think the brigadier thinks we’re here on bloody holiday. He writes it’s his daughter’s birthday on Saturday and he’s hosting a dinner for her and her friends, and could I join the male company? Doesn’t occur to him that the night before we move off I might have better things to do.”

“Can’t you say no?”

“I risked his good graces once before. I’d better not do it again.”

“Do you know his daughter?”

“Never met her. She’s a VAD at a base hospital further up the line.”

“She’ll know what things are like then. Her and her friends.”

“That’s the problem.”

“I’m sure they’ll be nice.”

They were stemming the blood of a generation of potential suitors. They’d _have_ to be nice if they didn’t want to end up one of the surplus women.

“Mark my words,” Toby said grimly, “this dinner is secretly a marriage market.”

“You might like one of them.”

Toby looked at the crate, where the photograph ought to be. “I might,” he said doubtfully. “Are you married?”

He’d noticed the absence of a ring. Though perhaps men didn’t wear them in his culture.

“No. My sister married just before the war, and she’s got two children now.” He smiled. “She’s taken the pressure off me for a while.”

“I suppose you’ll, ah, have to marry within the faith?”

“Well,” Joshi said calmly, “I don’t believe marriage is right for everyone.”

“No. Not even in my world. Second sons aren’t much of a catch.”

That had always been his vision of his life: wifeless, childless, a comfortable flat, modest success in some obscure field of study. A lonely life, perhaps, but not a miserable one. He’d long given up the idea of happiness. Life was simply something one had to get through, as inoffensively as one could.

Joshi said, “Depends who’s doing the catching.”

Toby’s forehead itched where his cap had dug in. There would be a red line grooved into the skin. Joshi looking at him always made him more aware of his own body. It was as though he could feel the blood moving under his skin, and as though Joshi could see it, and didn’t mind seeing it.

Joshi straightened up from the wall. “Can I help you put any of this away, sir?”

They put the cake, sweets, cocoa powder and matches back into the box for Robbie to pack with the rations. Everything else was put by Toby’s pack for moving off. He held out one of the pairs of socks.

“You’d better have these. I don’t want to lose you to trench foot. Don’t argue with me please,” he said, when Joshi opened his mouth. “One spare pair is luxury enough for me. And could you give the chocolate to the sergeant-major to share out between the men? No need to tell them it’s from me.”

“Keep some for yourself, sir.”

Joshi placed several bars on the pile for Toby’s pack. He closed the lid of the box, and the bottle of whiskey came into view.

“Shall I put that in to go with the rations, sir?”

“No, that’s alright.” He groped for his commanding officer smile. “They only give us scotch in the rations, and I prefer the Irish stuff. Good for a cold night.”

Joshi picked up the box. “I’ll remember that, sir,” he said.

***

Toby slept through dinner, then went to the mess and had a bottle of wine, watching the others sing and play cards and complain, white faces glowing like skulls in torchlight. Joshi was waiting up for him again. As he undressed him, he asked calmly about battalion headquarters, and whether Toby had enjoyed his ride, and told him that the men had been very pleased with the chocolate, and that Green hadn’t mentioned his name. The cold hurt distantly, as though breaching a foreign body, and Toby watched disinterestedly as the hairs rose on his bare arm.

In the dream he lies silently in front of the wire. It must be the German wire, because the voices twenty feet or so beyond are saying things he cannot understand. A wiring party then, sent to cut holes in preparation for a raid. The German wire is made from iron. One could impale oneself on the spikes. Toby has heard it happen in the dark. Boot polish has got up his nose and he is frightened he’ll sneeze, and then the game will be up. He’ll send them all west. But there doesn’t seem to be anybody else. Perhaps they’ve gone back without him. But he is the officer. They can’t go back without his say-so. Unless they thought he was dead. Perhaps he _is_ dead, and here is where the dead go, abandoned forever in No Man’s Land, waiting for their fellows to join them at the wire. The wiring party have done a poor job. He can see no holes cut. The raiders will be sliced through tomorrow. They will hang from the spikes like ripening fruit.

He got up at dawn, the muscle memory of stand-to, and sat on the ground in front of his hut, dew seeping through the seat of his breeches. The rows of tents were dark and quiet. Joshi would be in bed, or ought to be. Toby thought of him on his pallet, lips slightly parted, the smooth, kind face blank with sleep. Shadowed with stubble again. Or watching the light move up the canvas, listening for the bugler. Thinking whether Toby would be awake when he came in.

He had a smoke. Hunger gnawed at him. He pressed his empty hand between his thighs to warm it.

“Surveying your kingdom, skip?”

Woody sat down beside him. There were rings beneath his eyes.

Toby held out his cigarette case. “What are you doing up?”

“The chap next door to me shouts in his sleep. I’ve been awake since two. In the end I went to the mess and wrote to Jill.” He grimaced. “She’s hinting about children.”

“Don’t you want any?”

“I don’t want to give her a kid she’ll have to raise on her own. And it’ll be harder for her to marry again with another man’s child.” Woody tapped ash onto the grass. “Reckon it’s time _you_ got yourself settled.”

“Hardly. Besides, I don’t think I’d make much of a father.”

“Rubbish. I can see you with a little boy. You’d build model engines together. Or collect stamps. Lord help your poor wife.”

He’d had his own railway line in the nursery. It had been Freddie’s too really, but he always got bored and wanted to make the engines crash into each other. Toby would spend wet afternoons rerouting the track, rearranging the little figures on the bridge or in the station or on the platform, deciding where they were travelling, calculating the miles, how long it would take. There was a little boy figure with dark painted hair who he always put at the front with the driver, so he could see exactly where they were going. The first time his father had struck his face, a flat, open palm, shocking the breath from him, he’d run upstairs and set his favourite engine running and lain in the centre of the track and pretended he was the little boy at the front of the train, who couldn’t be caught. The next night, his father had come upstairs with a parcel from Hamleys, and held Toby in his lap as he opened the new engine, and told him how clever he was to know so much about trains at his age. Even when Freddie had come over, he’d told him to run along, it was Toby’s turn tonight, and Toby’s happiness had been complete. It was _never_ his turn. He’d never been good enough. After the next slap, Toby had waited excitedly by the track; but his father hadn’t come up, and Nanny had said that bad children couldn’t expect presents, when it hadn’t been the present he’d been waiting for. Perhaps one had to be tough with boys. If they were loved too much, they wouldn’t give themselves up to the guns.

“I’ve got foot inspection this morning,” Woody said. “Enough to bring your breakfast back up. Even Jesus might’ve thought twice if my platoon had been in the temple.”

Foot inspection. Kit inspection. Wash rotas. Drill. Parade. Compulsory games, which was always football, and which Toby always had to referee even though he’d never learnt the rules. The ceaseless flood of letters to be censored. For every empty, dragging hour in the line, time at the base strained its seams. Petty tasks. Petty grievances. Giving orders, making lists, striking out in black pencil. Being both mother and father, and headmaster, and head boy, and spokesman, and chairman, and priest, and nurse. Roaring at them across the parade field, then kneeling at their feet, bathing their sores. He could understand why men ran. Or mutinied and shot their officers. They probably only wanted a bit of peace.

He went down to the stables during lunch and slipped into Enable’s loose-box. She was munching from her hay-net, and he felt the muscles shift and ripple beneath her skin as he rested his forehead against her neck. She smelt thick and quiet like dust. He didn’t mind animals. He liked how his father’s dog would sometimes rest his head in his lap while he read. He liked going riding when he was at the estate, because as long as you took care of the horse, the horse would take care of you. Their needs were simple, and easily met. You could know when they were pleased with you.

“You’re welcome to take her out again, if you can find the time.”

Toby saluted. Colonel Bartlett, late fifties, Royal Military College, was putting on his gloves.

“I brought her over with me from England. My niece Susan trained her, would you believe.”

“It was kind of you to trust me with her, sir.”

Toby stepped out of the box as the lad brought in the tack.

“The brigadier tells me you’re invited to this soirée on Saturday.” The colonel tapped his crop against his boot. “You’re a lucky devil, Hamilton. The daughter’s a cracking girl.”

“I was hoping, sir, you might excuse me. The night before we move off – ”

“All the more reason you should go. Pretty girls, champagne, a good dinner – it’ll do you good. You’d better have someone give your hair a trim.” He clapped Toby’s shoulder. “Come to me after dinner and we’ll have a proper talk.”

Toby went to the wash-tent and looked in the mirror. He splashed his face, tried to comb his lank hair with his fingers. His bath wasn’t scheduled until Friday. He filled the bowl with clean water, bent his head, and tried to rinse out some of the grease. He scrubbed until it hurt, until he felt his skin begin to tear beneath his nails, long and untrimmed like a woman’s. He didn’t dare look back in the mirror. Sometimes he felt he could see through himself, through the tunic, shirt, vest, the colourless, lice-scarred skin, into the dark space within the hollow of his ribcage, and out the other side to the grass and the tent-flap and the officer waiting behind it. He wanted to tuck his head into the dark space and listen to the growth and shrink of his lungs.

In the rest hour before dinner, he found Joshi playing poker with Hill and Taylor in the shade of a parked bus. They scrambled up when they saw him, and he wondered whether they more concerned about being told off for gambling, or being asked whether he could join them.

“I’m sorry to add to your labours,” he said as they walked back to his hut, their shadows stretching ahead of them on the path. Joshi was in-step beside him, not behind his elbow as he ought to be. “The colonel wants to see me later and he’ll only nag if it isn’t done. Bit of a nuisance really, with the letters still to do.”

“I’ve never cut hair before, sir.”

“You can hardly make me look any worse.”

In the hut, Joshi cleared the crate and set it on its end in the gap between the bed and the wall.

“There’s a pair of scissors and a comb in my shaving kit.”

Toby removed his tunic, tie and shirt. He felt shyer in the daylight, and grimier. It was like submitting to an Army medical, except at least then one never had to see the Medical Officer again afterwards.

“How much would you like off, sir?”

“Just tidy the ends. And perhaps thin out the back a little.”

He perched on the crate, his back to him. He jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

Joshi began to comb his still-damp hair. He was gentle, easing the knots, then smoothing with his palm to make it lie flat.

“Tell me if I’m hurting you.” His hands were warm on his neck as he tilted his head down. “Stay there for me.”

The rasp of the scissors as the blades parted.

“You won’t have me court-martialled, sir, if this goes wrong?”

“I’ll let the colonel be the judge of that.”

Toby felt him separating small sections of hair, drawing them straight with the comb, away from his head. He heard the points of the scissors as they closed. Joshi brushed off the back of his neck with the pads of his fingers.

“Keep looking down for me.”

Toby closed his eyes. He could feel Joshi concentrating. The base was very quiet with the men at rest. Joshi brushed his neck again, then flattened his palm and pushed up into the thick hair at the back of his head, catching the soreness on his scalp. He pulled back to hold the ends between his fingers. The scissors squeaked. Joshi combed it flat. Toby felt his hand between his shoulder blades, sweeping away the shorn hair. He would be able to count the knobs of his spine through his vest.

Joshi worked slowly. There was no mirror; Toby could only trust him. He allowed him to position his head, arranging him, delicately correcting.

“Good,” he said, when Toby stayed in place.

He kept his eyes shut, even when Joshi moved in front of him, trimming the hair that fell low on his forehead. A thumb and finger closed around his chin, lifting his face.

“Relax for me.”

Toby opened his eyes. Joshi was looking at him. He raised the comb, still holding his chin, and pushed the hair back from his face, out of his eyes. He handed him the comb, and closed his fingers around Toby’s as he took it, and Toby couldn’t look away.

When it was done, and Joshi had brushed off his shoulders and put the comb and scissors back into the shaving kit and said he’d come while Toby was at dinner to put the room back, he left to get his own dinner, and Toby leant back against the door, scalp tingling, and realised he was hard.

***

“Very tidy,” the colonel said, handing Toby a brandy. “I might have to ask him to do mine. Woodward told me he’s a coloured chappie?”

“Yes, sir.”

The colonel had a small office off the operations room, with two dainty, faded-pink winged armchairs. He looked like a toy soldier let loose at a doll’s tea-party.

“Speaks English alright, does he? Whereabouts is he from?”

“Paddington, I believe, sir. He was a barman there in peacetime.”

The colonel smiled at him indulgently. “Well, have it your own way. Although I wonder he wouldn’t be better off in a colonial regiment, with his own sort.”

“He’s getting along well, sir. He’s very solicitous.”

“Well, that’s one thing I _will_ say about the coloureds. Very biddable. Can’t do enough for you. Providing you’ve a tip for them afterwards, of course.”

“Was there something you wanted to speak with me about, sir?”

The colonel looked older out of the sun, lines trenched in his forehead. He was the sort to die a bachelor, Toby thought, married to the regiment, dozens of junior officers his adopted sons.

“When did you last have some leave?”

“I was supposed to have a week in January, sir, but it was cancelled. Problems with transport.”

“You didn’t rearrange it?”

“I thought Woodward ought to have his wedding.”

The colonel offered him a cigar. “You don’t go home, do you?”

“I get a room at the Hôtel Métropol in Paris.”

“I wouldn’t be _your_ mother.”

“Our estate’s been requisitioned for a convalescent home. She has her hands full enough, I think.”

“Look here,” the colonel said, “I want you to take a fortnight off. Your family own the Halcyon Hotel, don’t they? Go there and get some rest. Visit your poor mother. Breathe in the old country.”

The cigar was very strong. He felt clumsy with it, like a boy trying on his father’s watch.

“The new men have only been with us a week, sir. I ought to be here whilst they get used to things.”

“For heaven’s sake, Hamilton.” The colonel puffed his cigar irritably. “You look done in. It’s bad for morale to have a company commander trailing around the base like a whipped dog.”

“I’m alright, sir. Just a bit tired.”

“Woodward tells me you haven’t been coming to meals. He finds you sat outside without a coat at five in the morning. _I_ find you in the stables instead of in the mess with the others.”

Toby recognised his expression. Disappointed. Let down. Expected better.

“Do you think you’re the only one who’s tired?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you think you’re the only one who’s fed up?”

“No, sir.”

“I’ve a good mind to write to your father at the Admiralty.”

“Please don’t, sir.” Toby swallowed. “I’ll get a good sleep tonight and I’ll be alright in the morning. I promise.”

He looked down. He lifted the cigar to his mouth, but it had gone out.

“You’re a good officer, Hamilton,” the colonel was saying, “very good. You’ve been out nigh on two years, haven’t you? No-one would blame you if you went for a little rest. Now, you say you want to stick it out, and that’s very admirable. But you’ll have to pull yourself together. I expect my officers to set an example. Come, now, have another drink.”

He refilled Toby’s glass and pressed it into his hands, and Toby drank it in two gulps, cigar going cold on the arm of the chair.

“I want to see a marked improvement by the brigadier’s dinner on Saturday. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. We’ll leave it there.”

Toby put on his cap and saluted, but stopped at the door.

“Please don’t write to my father, sir.”

“It’s in your hands, Hamilton. Straight to bed now, there’s a good chap.”

Toby cut back through the mess, smoky and noisy, choked with khaki and gold braid. Woody was in a corner, playing bridge with Gower, Langham and Netherby.

“The next time you want to undermine me to the colonel behind my back, let me know first. I’ll give you my diary for him to read. Should be a little more sodding accurate.”

“Skip – ”

Toby turned and walked out of the mess, away from the shocked little faces of the juniors. He’d have been crucified if he’d sneaked on another boy like that at school. He felt a savage embarrassment on Woody’s behalf. There’d be no-one to stand him a drink once word got round the mess. Perhaps he didn’t like taking orders from someone younger. Perhaps he’d been so keen for him to take the adjutant job because he’d thought he’d be put in command of the company. Perhaps he’d worked out how much of the whisky in their mess box was drunk by Toby. But what business was it of his, or the colonel’s, _how_ he was managing? His company was punctual, well-fed, well-turned-out. His officers and NCOs were diligent and well-liked by the men. His portion of the line was always clean and well-defended and efficiently run. Their wire was always unbreachable. Nobody wanted for anything that was in Toby’s power to give them. He _was_ managing, managing very well, though clearly the colonel felt he ought to look like Douglas Fairbanks whilst he was doing it. How dare he threaten him with his father. Just because they’d been at Eton together. As though his father would even remember him. As though he’d give a damn anyhow.

And there were still the bloody letters to do. There was no light under the door of his hut. Joshi hadn’t come tonight. He put on the light himself, and saw everything had been put back in its place, the hair swept up, his belongings arranged again on the crate. He turned the light off and sat on the bed in the dark, feeling disappointed, and stupid about it. Joshi wasn’t _required_ to come. Toby had been clear that he shouldn’t lose his sleep. He could put himself to bed. He was the youngest company commander in the regiment. He didn’t need _looking after_. Perhaps Joshi was feeling overworked. Perhaps he felt Toby was taking advantage, asking him to cut his hair, but was too _biddable_ to say no. What rubbish the colonel talked. Joshi hadn’t been very biddable when he’d been positioning Toby’s head, lifting his face, placing him as he liked.

Perhaps Joshi had told the men over dinner what Toby had asked him to do. Perhaps they’d laughed about him. Perhaps Joshi had _seen_ , even through his baggy breeches, and was too alarmed to come back. Perhaps he thought Toby would demand something of him. It happened. Out here. At school. No girls. Exceptional circumstances. A need for release. Perhaps he’d told the others about that too.

Someone knocked. Toby rubbed his sleeve over his face. He left the light off, so when he opened the door the dark outside seemed brighter and softer than the hut.

“Did I wake you, sir?”

Joshi was holding a tray with a dented silver pot, his face shadowed by the door.

“What’s this?”

“I thought some coffee might be of use, sir.”

Toby saw the practised way Joshi was balancing the tray. A barman in peacetime. He’d have seen hundreds of drunks pass through The Victoria in Paddington. And last night and the night before, he’d seen Toby’s hands, smelt Toby’s breath. This morning, he’d seen the bottle.

“You don’t need to bring coffee out to my room.”

“Oh.” Joshi sounded surprised. “I’m sorry, Captain Hamilton, I just thought – I know you work long hours and – ”

“I don’t require managing, Joshi.”

“Of course, Captain Hamilton. I’m sorry if I’ve behaved otherwise.”

Joshi stepped back, out of the shadow of the door, and for the second time that night Toby was faced with disappointment.

“No, I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I’m sorry too. I – ”

“Please.” Joshi couldn’t salute while holding the tray, but he straightened up smartly. “You have nothing to apologise for, sir.”

He walked back up the path, and Toby watched him until he saw light and several bodies spill from the officers’ mess. He closed the door. Shame tightened his throat. He might’ve been having a warm drink with Joshi now. He could’ve thanked him properly for the haircut. He might even have told him about the colonel, and Joshi would have been calm, and really listened to him, and agreed with him that Woody had been out of order, and that the colonel had no right to go telling tales. He’d lift his face again with that lovely smile and touch the ends of his hair, to check they were even.

Even if it was just to get his lance corporal stripes. Toby took off his boots, and brought the whiskey out from underneath the bed.

***

He had fallen asleep on top of the blankets, fully dressed. No dream. Through half-lidded eyes he watched Joshi recap the bottle, a quarter empty now, and place it back beneath the bed.

“I met Colonel Bartlett on the path, sir. He says he looks forward to seeing you at breakfast.”

He stood Toby’s boots up as he left. Toby considered skipping breakfast again, just to spite them all, but eventually he swallowed the mug of tea and pulled his clothes straight.

The colonel wasn’t there – Toby hadn’t really expected him to slum it in the mess – and he sat with the other company commanders and forced down bread and jam. He felt Woody’s eyes on the back of his head.

“My cousin’s with the Royal Artillery,” Captain Jenrick was saying, “and _he_ reckons there’s a push coming alright. Top brass wants us to cut off Jerry’s main supply route, starve ‘em out.”

“What do they expect _us_ to do? Tear up the railway line with trench-picks?”

“Surely it’s a job for the big guns.”

“They’ll want us for the charge, while Jerry’s looking the other way. Eight, ten weeks tops, my cousin says.”

“Fine August bank holiday _that_ ’ll be.”

“Whereabouts is their main supply route?”

“South-east of here,” said Toby. “Near Passchendaele.”

“So we’ll be right in the thick of it,” Jenrick said decisively.

Eight to ten weeks. Middle to late July. Well, the colonel wouldn’t get his wish after all; there’d be no leave approved now, not with an attack planned. And if the fight was for Passchendaele, the Royal Leicestershires would be at the centre of it. He hadn’t led a charge in almost a year, not since Fromelles. This part of the line had gone stagnant. Their war had become one of endurance. But now the scythe was being turned their way again.

He rose early the next morning and rode out on Enable. The fields were empty, damp and silver in the dawn. It would soon be time to cut the hay. He had the mad idea of riding over to Passchendaele, though it was almost ten miles, to check the slope of the land, the rise of the ridges they’d be expected to capture, the going of the ground. The maps they’d be issued with would be out of date. Buildings which had already been obliterated. Woods which had already been snapped at the root. Roads cratered, impassable. No-one would warn the civilians. If his battalion managed to reach the village, they would see women and children dead in the road, or entombed in the rubble of their homes. The first time they’d marched through Ypres, he’d seen the body of a little boy, curled in the dust, as though he’d fallen asleep waiting for his friends. He hadn’t been a captain then. He couldn’t stop the march to move him.

Colonel Bartlett was in the yard, crop tap tap tap against his boot.

“We weren’t out for long, sir,” Toby said, dismounting. “She shouldn’t be tired.”

“You’ll have warmed her up for me. Off to breakfast now, are you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good man.” The colonel took Enable’s reins. “I dined with the brigadier last night. Told him about your coloured chappie. He wants him to help serve at the dinner on Saturday – says it’ll be a real treat to have a proper waiter.”

“Oh – sir, I’m sorry, but he’s a barman, not a waiter as such – ”

“He can carry a tray, can’t he? Then he’ll be a damn sight better than most of the soldier-servants at HQ. How the brigadier stands it…”

From the main camp, a bell began to ring, mournful and droning, as though a cow was shaking its head.

“Excuse me, sir.”

Toby jogged up the field, being overtaken by the stable lads, who were pulling their masks from the pouches around their necks and wriggling them down over their heads. The men were collecting on the parade field, Second Battalion, A, B C, D, Third Battalion, A, B, C, D, sixteen hundred khaki stalks, pale masks like heads of wheat awaiting shearing.

The men loathed gas drill. They were supposed to assemble by company, eight straight lines, two hundred apiece, the commanding officer’s platoon at the head, the newest officer’s platoon at the rear. But the masks had dreadful visibility, and everybody looked bloody identical, so men who thought they were stood with Second Battalion, B Company might really be standing with Third Battalion, C Company, being bellowed at by a sergeant-major they’d never seen before, but unable to break the line. As a junior officer, Toby had once tried to take roll-call of a platoon in an entirely different regiment, the flat, disced eyes of the masks staring ahead blankly.

Woody, Gower, Langham and Netherby were already there, each counting forty heads, calling forty names, like prefects in a fire-drill. Joshi was near the front of the line, detectable by the dark skin of his hands. He turned his head when Toby called his name, and Toby wondered what his face was doing now he knew Toby couldn’t see it. He was frightening without his face, half-made. It was the sort of face one could keep looking at and always find beautiful new things in. Faces like that could never be violent, or cruel, or cold, even when one deserved it. When Joshi had his children, he would never strike them. They would look at his face and know he didn’t want them afraid.

In the line behind Joshi were several bare heads, looking down, as though if they couldn’t see Toby, he wouldn’t see them.

“Have you lost your respirators?” he asked them, once the bell rang again to end the drill.

“No, sir.”

“Is there a problem with them?”

“No, sir.”

“Then why aren’t you wearing them?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“I know they’re a nuisance. It’s a nuisance for me to walk around in spurs like Billy the Kid. We all have our crosses. So never leave your tents without them again, is that understood?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Toby dismissed them. “I don’t suppose I was a little harsh?” he asked Green.

“Better than a lungful of gas, sir.”

“Quite. Oh, and I saw Colonel Bartlett just now – the brigadier would like Private Joshi to help serve at this dinner on Saturday night. He can come there and back with me in the car. Will you inform him? I doubt I’ll see much of him before we go.”

***

The brigadier had sent an open-top three-seater, and Toby was squeezed between Joshi and the driver as they rattled along the Menin Road, shoulders and thighs pressed tightly together. At the junction, a military policeman checked their passes, then the driver turned right, away from the road that led down to the _pavé_ and on to the front line. The sun was low and engorged, blood orange on the horizon, and Toby felt that before they could reach battalion headquarters they would drive right into it, into the heat and noise and drought, and it would be over like going blind, the light whitening before it went out.

“I don’t know how you stand it,” he said to the driver. His hand rested on his revolver in its holster. “The back of my neck’s prickling.”

“Very quiet ‘round here, sir. Have more trouble with the farm folk than we do with the Boche.”

Yesterday he’d had his bath at last, and Joshi had cleaned and brushed his uniform again. He was wearing the new things his mother had sent – shirt, vest, socks, long johns – and his case had fresh cigarettes. Joshi had even polished the regimental badge on his cap. Perhaps he thought Toby would catch a girl, and that it would make him pleasanter to deal with.

When they arrived at the château, Toby tipped the driver, and Joshi got out and held the car door open for him, hair glowing dark against the pale stone.

“We’re in for a treat,” Captain Friar called, waving Toby over from the front doors, grinding a cigarette beneath his heel. The driver was taking Joshi around the back. “Chicken pâté to start, then lobster, then duck, then chocolate soufflé. And there’s a birthday cake for after. And _six_ bottles of champagne.”

“All your doing, I suppose?”

“The brigadier knew he’d get a better menu from me if I was invited to eat it. They’re smashing girls,” he said, conspiratorial, leading Toby inside. “One or two might be up for a bit of fun later, once the old boys are in bed.”

The entrance hall was long and narrow and cool, lit with candles, so their shadows leapt black and tapered against the stone walls. Toby looked up at the vaulted, cobwebbed ceiling, and wondered if this was the moment, after the happily ever after, when the virgin princess steps inside her new life and realises her terrible mistake. Then Friar opened a door on the left and they went into the drawing room, gold and pink and pale green and lilac, a woman’s room, upholstered furniture, little round tables for the candles, a baby grand piano, a fireplace with a huge gilt mirror above it, but everything shabby and worn and smudged and marked, unaired, untuned, as though the room was the only thing that was real and it was the people who were the ghosts, moving about and laughing together as though the splendour was still there. It might have been a hundred years ago. It might have been a hundred years since. The room would outlive them all. They were already relics.

Toby saluted the brigadier, a ruddy walrus of a man, who beamed at him and introduced him as though he was a favourite nephew. There were three other men: the lieutenant-colonel, the adjutant-general, and Captain Dogby, the brigadier’s new adjutant, who clearly already knew who Toby was and had decided to dislike him for it. The six girls looked between twenty-one and thirty, identical in heavy blue uniform dresses with neat white collars and cuffs. Their hems were dark with old blood. Toby supposed they were very lovely. They all looked tired, and rather pale, no rouge or earrings or feathers. One of them, blonde, hollow-faced, had a muscle twitching in her neck.

“Happy birthday,” he said stiffly when the brigadier introduced his daughter. She looked about his age, with thick brown hair and a pink, earnest face.

“Thank heavens you’ve come,” she said. “When Daddy told me he was organising a party I was terrified everyone would be old.” She touched his elbow. “He says you’re going back into the line tomorrow, so we must give you a memorable night to take with you.”

“Perhaps you’ll take Theresa into dinner, Hamilton,” the brigadier said.

Friar winked across at him. He would be the evening’s star attraction: charming, handsome, in a brittle, dried-out sort of way, and a job behind the lines, safe and full-limbed and beginning to think of the end of the war, and who would look after him. But the brigadier knew who Toby’s father was, and that his heir was unmarried and in the RFC, where the average life expectancy for a pilot was two weeks. He supposed Miss Buchanan seemed nice enough. She wasn’t unattractive. She could probably make a go of any marriage her father arranged for her by sheer force of will.

“Well, Mummy insisted on getting me an Irish Hunter,” she told him during the pâté, eating quickly, as though she was used to having her plate taken away before she was finished, “but Daddy wanted to get me a Darley Arabian. I mean, honestly, it’s as though sometimes he doesn’t remember there’s a war at all.”

Joshi leant between them and refilled Toby’s wineglass.

“You simply must see the estate.”

“Yes. Of course. After the war.”

“Daddy says you take out Colonel Bartlett’s horse when you’re at the base. I’d love to see her.”

“I’m sure Colonel Bartlett would be happy to arrange it.”

When the lobster was taken away, it was time to turn, and on Toby’s other side was the blonde girl, who stared down listlessly at the napkin in her lap. When she reached for her glass, he saw the muscle had wasted in her hands, bones stretching the skin like the ribs of an umbrella.

The duck was brought out. Joshi poured the next wine. Wax dripped down the candlestick onto the tablecloth. The soufflés hadn’t risen very well, but were eaten anyway. Joshi poured the sweet wine.

“I haven’t eaten like this since before the war,” the blonde girl said. She had a flat voice, as though speaking from somewhere else. “Everything at the hospital tastes of onions.”

“Even the tea.”

The shadow of smile. “You’re an old hand, then.”

“Don’t be long,” Miss Buchanan said to him, rising to take the other girls through to the drawing room. He felt her brush the braid of his cuff.

A decanter of port and six glasses were placed on the table. Joshi caught his eye as the soldier-servants slipped away through the service door, so Toby didn’t hear his name when the brigadier offered him a cigar. He wondered if they’d be able to get the wax out of the lace. Joshi would probably know a thing like that.

“A quick word, Hamilton,” the brigadier said, when they got up to join the ladies. Dogby glared at him.

“Thank you for inviting me tonight, sir,” Toby said, once the dining room door had closed.

“Good of you to come. I hope my daughter is keeping you entertained.”

“She’s quite remarkable, sir.”

The brigadier poured himself another glass of port and gestured for him to sit opposite, as though Toby was his head of house, summoned to discuss the first eleven.

“You’re looking a bit tired, Hamilton.”

“I’m alright, sir.”

“You didn’t eat very much.”

“I’m not used to rich food anymore, sir.”

“Colonel Bartlett thinks it’s time you had a rest.”

“Sir – ”

“Now, don’t get excited,” the brigadier said, wagging his cigar. “He told me you weren’t keen and I can understand that. You’ve been with the battalion since the beginning. Of _course_ you don’t want to miss the end. You want to be there when we reach Berlin. Don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But I have to place my resources where they’re most useful. You’re a fine company commander, Hamilton. No-one’s questioning that. It’s why I want you to reconsider my offer to be my adjutant.”

“What about Captain Dogby?”

The brigadier’s mouth thinned. “Captain Dogby is returning to England to train cadets. We have a new draft of men coming out in eight weeks’ time. He’ll go back on their boat.”

“For the attack, sir?”

“How on earth – ”

“A rumour in the mess, sir.”

The brigadier clicked his tongue. “How _do_ these things get about. So you see I’ll be needing a replacement, to start in eight weeks’ time. The middle of July.”

“But then I’d miss the attack, sir.”

“Yes. You would.” He looked at Toby kindly. “Have a good think about it. You’ll be back at the base again in three weeks or so – you can give me your answer then. In the meantime, take a little more care of yourself. Get your batman to take you in hand. Make sure Woodward and the young ones pull their weight.”

He stood up. “We’d better let them in to clear.”

“I’ll follow you, sir.”

Toby lit a cigarette. He was back in the story, the virgin princess with the impossible choice: the price of his neck, his hand in marriage. You scratch my back, as Friar had said. But he knew he wasn’t really being fair. It was a priceless offer. Two years ago he’d have cared about seeing it out, reaching Berlin. As the adjutant, he could help the brigadier with getting there. And yet. He tapped ash onto the floor. The dead would stay dead. Nothing would be rubbed out. He could watch the Union Jack hoisted above the Royal Palace in Berlin, but his innocence would not be returned to him. It had been clawed out of him at Loos, and rotted with the bodies there.

“No, come in,” he said, when Joshi hesitated at the service door. “I should be out of here.”

Toby watched his quick, slender hands collect the glasses. Clink, clink, clink. There was nothing ruined in Joshi. He didn’t belong in a pub, swilling pints, serving peanuts. He ought to be somewhere grand and beautiful, all marble and silver and fresh, clean smells, where no-one would expect him to wait on them. People would wait on _him_. There was something in him that called Toby to worship.

“I’m sorry about that business the other night.”

He shuffled the cigarettes in his case, evening the gaps. He felt Joshi’s gaze touch his face.

“That’s alright, sir.”

“No, I – I was rude. All I can say is I was frustrated about something quite different. I wouldn’t like you to think I don’t – _appreciate_ everything you do.”

He reached for the ashtray, forcing himself to look up. “Have they given you some dinner?”

“I’ll have it once I’ve cleared.” Joshi was smiling at him. “Are you enjoying the evening?”

“I’m afraid I’m not giving the ladies much fun.”

“Miss Buchanan didn’t seem to think so.”

Toby laughed. “You’re as bad as my mother.”

“Captain Hamilton?”

A girl’s voice was calling from the hall.

“Christ. You’ve summoned her.”

“Captain Hamilton?”

“Quick – ”

Toby scrambled off his chair and underneath the table, shielded by the cloth. Footsteps stopped outside the dining room, and then Joshi was there too, very close, so as they heard the door open, Toby felt breath on his cheek. Miss Buchanan’s booted feet stepped into the room. She called his name again, though doubtfully now. Joshi looked as though he was about to speak, and Toby’s palm flew out to touch his mouth. Miss Buchanan seemed to still for a moment. Joshi was rigid beneath his hand, hardly breathing. Then she went out of the room, her boots squeaking back towards the drawing room, and Toby wanted to laugh, and he turned to Joshi to tell him they’d got away with it, that it was alright.

A warm, chapped mouth pressed against his. He had a sense of being grasped and held there, though there were no hands on him; gently, quietly, as though he were something to be cared for, something prized. He moved towards it, opened his eyes as it began to leave him, to see its shape.

Joshi was still very close. His gaze dropped to Toby’s mouth again. His lips parted, to breathe, to speak, to have him again.

Toby’s head knocked the underside of the table as he struggled out, throwing back the cloth, expecting Joshi to stop him, to feel a painful grip on his arm, and he didn’t want to look back and see the threat marring that lovely face. But Joshi didn’t touch him, didn’t speak, and Toby had crossed the room and got out into the coolness of the hall. He shut the door behind him and moved away from it, as though it were guilty by association. Some of the candles had burnt out and he couldn’t remember which way they’d come in, where the front doors would be. It was too dark after the bright dining room. He fumbled for his cigarettes, and realised he’d left them on the table. He’d have to wait until Joshi had gone downstairs. He ought to tell the brigadier. Joshi ought to be court-martialled. Disrespecting a senior officer. Perhaps that was how a chap got his stripes in the East Surreys, but it couldn’t be stood for in his company. Colonel Bartlett would say it was the coloured way, pack him off to a colonial regiment where he could behave as he liked, with his own sort. Toby wouldn’t have to see that smile again, or feel the blood move under his skin.

A door opened further down the hall and he started, in case Joshi had already told, and now they were coming to take his stars from him.

“What are you lurking out here for? The brigadier wants to do the toast.”

Friar was flushed, eyes all pupil.

“I – I don’t feel – ”

“Shut up and come and have some champagne. You’re going to miss the cake.”

Toby kept his head bent as Friar pulled him into the drawing room, in case the others should see Joshi’s mark on his mouth.

***

No buses would be laid on to take them back into the line. That privilege was reserved for the trench-weary. They were to march to Ypres, then back into the same set of trenches they’d held the previous month. Toby didn’t like it. It felt like tempting fate, like they were cocking their helmets to the gods and saying, _couldn’t catch us last time, could you?_ And there would be less for him to do, to fill the time with. At night the dugouts would be too warm for sleep. The whisky would go hot in the bottles.

Joshi had packed for him before they’d left for the party. They’d been driven back in silence, still squashed against each other, and when he’d undressed for bed he’d expected to see red marks on the skin where it had touched beneath the fabric. He’d been very cold on the drive, and realised he wasn’t drunk. He’d had one polite glass of champagne, then escaped through the French windows into the grounds before Miss Buchanan and her father could guilt him into a dance. Navy sky, no stars, not a breath of wind, the guns silent as the line slept.

Tonight he would be with them. In three weeks he would be back. Or perhaps he wouldn’t. If it had your name on it, as the men said, it would find you. Perhaps it was easier for them to think of it as pre-destined. Easier to face Fate than bad luck. You could find some meaning in Fate. Besides, no man truly thought _he_ would die. Dying was what happened to other people.

Behind him, someone had played the piano; perhaps the twitching blonde girl. He’d heard the girls laughing breathlessly, pictured their blue, bloodied skirts catching between khaki legs as they danced. A soldier-servant had come out and returned his cigarette case. Toby had opened it, but it had been as he’d left it, and if he’d wanted, hoped for a note, even a token, well, that was _his_ folly. He’d imagined Joshi sneaking it open, reading the inscription, learning his age, being surprised.

_For my son  
On his 18th birthday  
28th February 1912_

Father had given Freddie an identical one. Mother had ordered them for him. She had even wrapped them.

Joshi had said he didn’t smoke. But he’d taken the cigarette anyway, that first night, just because Toby had offered. He was the sort to always carry a box of matches with him, in case Toby ever needed a light. Toby thought about his pay, unspent and slowly multiplying in his bank account, and everything he’d like to give Joshi with it.

He breakfasted early, then went to say goodbye to Enable. He fed her a sugar lump, scratching her glossy, proud neck. She tossed her head, as though to tell him not to make a meal of it. As he walked back up the field, the men were stuffing their packs, lacing their boots, a gloomy, Sunday feeling, knowing this was the last of beds and hot meals and of feeling the sun on the backs of their heads.

He had taken off his tunic in the wash-tent to shave, and was struggling with the buttons when there was a knock at the door of his hut.

“I apologise for disturbing you, sir.”

“No, that’s fine. I’m just getting ready for – well.”

The buttons were a damn nuisance. Perhaps the tailor had thought the war would be over before he’d need to undo them.

“What I did yesterday,” Joshi’s voice began, rehearsed, as though he’d sat up all night wording it, “it was wrong and I… I understand if you wish to replace me.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

Toby’s fingers slipped on the top button. He heard the floor move, as though Joshi was about to go.

“I’m meant to be clever. Clever enough to be a bloody adjutant, apparently. I’m meant to spot the missing pieces. Understand how they fit.”

He let go of the button and wiped his palms on his breeches. He remembered Joshi’s face after he’d kissed him, the serenity, the sense of enough.

“But I’ve never made sense. Until yesterday.”

He turned around, afraid for a moment that Joshi had gone after all. He was still standing at the door, but once Toby looked at him, rushing under his skin, tasting his own heart, Joshi moved to him. He reached for the button at his throat.

“May I know your name?”

“Adil. And yours?”

“Tobias. But people I like call me Toby.”

Adil had finished with the button, but his hands stayed at Toby’s collar.

“Hello, Toby.”

Toby kissed him carefully, testing the truth of it. He felt he could take in all the air in the room with one rise of his chest. He pulled back. It couldn’t be possible. He touched Adil’s face in reverence, and when Adil smiled at him, a little shyly now, Toby kissed him again, like a greeting, something shared.

* * *


	2. The Sacrifice

* * *

**IV.**

Feldman got them singing on the march, the black trench songs the men relished, and Toby, the head of the snake, setting the pace, found himself joining in, eight hundred pairs of boots keeping the time.

_Gassed last night, and gassed the night before.  
Going to get gassed tonight if we never get gassed anymore.  
When we're gassed, we’re sick as we can be,  
For phosgene and mustard gas is much too much for me.  
  
They're warning us, they're warning us.  
One respirator for the four of us.  
Thank your lucky stars that three of us can run,  
So one of us can use it all alone._

March for fifty minutes, rest for ten. Packs off. Spend a penny. Drink. Lie down. Permission to smoke. Packs on. Move off. At midday, when they had an hour’s rest for lunch, everyone dry and dusty and fed up of the sun they’d longed for since October, Toby called the roll, and when Joshi answered he met his eye across the pitted road and thought, _I know your name_.

The line ran to a strict rotation. Week One: support trenches, shallow, poorly irrigated, dangerous in the weeks leading up to an attack, when Jerry’s heavy shells, aimed for the _pavé_ that brought up artillery and rations and new drafts, might fall short and take out half a company. Week Two: reserve trenches, sour with the stench of the unburied dead, primed to move forward at any time if the battalion in front suffered heavy losses. Week Three: front line trenches, patrols, raids, wiring parties, keeping your head down, hoping Jerry won’t start anything you’ll be expected to finish. Week Four: base camp, to be fattened up again. The monthly, bloody cycle that shed at least half a dozen men – men Toby had been with since Loos, who had faced the wire with him – until the holes in the battalion had to be patched with strangers like the East Surreys. Like Joshi. Adil.

Toby had never sincerely wanted to die, or tried to die, but in him had grown an apathy. This was no way to live, below ground, dirty, wet, infested, bored, sleepless, too cold, too hot, nothing private. Dying would mean a bit of peace. Someone else to worry about feet and kit and wire. Colonel Bartlett would send an I-am-sorry-to-have-to-tell-you letter to his parents, with the parcel of his effects, and they would go into a drawer, or be got rid of, because only Catholics kept relics and _for Christ’s sake, Priscilla, they won’t bring him back_. The thought of simply disappearing, having done nothing, left no mark, frightened him more than the thought of death itself. It would be as though he’d never lived at all, and then what had been the point of the suffering, if there wasn’t something for him at the end of it, something to make it worthwhile. It must be worse for the young ones – Gower, Langham, Netherby, Hill, Taylor. If their fathers had got that gleam in their eyes just a year or two later…

Before Adil, time in the line was shaped by stand-to, meals, and going on duty. Now he formed the corners of Toby’s day. He came to Toby in the mornings, and they spoke about the weather forecast and what sort of night it had been as the others sat down to breakfast on the other side of the earth wall, Toby brushing the inside of his wrist as he straightened his tie. They met by the fire-step when Toby went on duty, unable to touch in the open trench, but feeling the other breathing beside them, stood so close that if a shell hit, they would go together. He came to nudge Toby towards sleep, standing respectfully beside the table, and when he said, _perhaps you should get some rest, sir_ , it sounded like, _come to bed_. When he smiled at Toby during an inspection, or saluted him as they passed on the duckboards, Toby had to look away. He felt him in his blood.

It had been almost a year since he’d tasted true fear, but he tasted it now, each shell-burst, each crack of rifle-fire, even when Adil was beside him. His dark skin protected him from snipers, who looked for the white flash of English flesh, but Toby searched for reasons to keep him underground, like a mother shielding her young. He took Adil off sentry duty. He lost his temper at the state of the servants’ tunnel. He began to grow afraid for himself again, at the thought of what he could have if they lasted to their next turn at the base, and the turn after that, and of it being snatched from him, having to manage without it when he’d only just understood how much he wanted it. Surely Adil couldn’t have been sent to him if they were only going to take him away. It couldn’t be permitted.

Adil whispered once, “You can’t keep giving me special treatment.”

“I’m the company commander. I can do what I like.”

Fingers ran over his hand.

“You look exhausted. Have a lie-down before dinner.”

“I need to look over the maps. I want to send a wiring party out tomorrow.”

Adil shook his head. “If we were at home, I’d take you to bed.”

“That’s your idea of rest, is it?”

But he did lie down, and Adil touched his cheek before going up into the trench. Gower and Langham were talking in low voices on the other side of the wall, pencils scratching, and he closed his eyes, turning his face to the wall.

He hadn’t properly considered going to bed with Adil. Beds were for married couples. At school, boys didn’t _go to bed_ with one another; they got on their knees in the boathouse, or fumbled blindly in dark classrooms, or stared at the grain of the desk and pretended it wasn’t happening. Like that, it was easier to understand: there was a clear beginning, middle and end, a leader and a follower, the active and the passive, the bugger and the buggered. Exceptional circumstances. A need for release. Wrong, forbidden, but unavoidable. Toby had steered clear of it all. He’d been lucky, in his junior years, that he’d been short and scrawny and shy, so the older boys hadn’t given him a second look.

 _Could_ it be tender, like the kiss? Or would it have to be quick and brusque, before they heard footsteps outside the door? Which part would he take? How much licence would Adil give him? What would happen if Toby tested his patience? Some of it would probably hurt. Not shot-in-the-guts, bayoneted-in-the-neck hurt, but enough that he might have to go somewhere else in his head until it was done.

He tried to picture it, but it was like imagining the end of the war: shapeless, unknowable. He got up and worked on the maps, and when Robbie brought out dinner, he ate the soup then left the rest for the others. He had some of his whiskey, sat on his bed in the dark. Adil wasn’t going to hurt him. Toby was taller, for a start. He had his stars to protect him. He had his revolver. He put the bottle down. Adil wasn’t going to hurt him, and Toby wasn’t going to _shoot_ him. He ran a hand over his face. It almost made one miss having only the wire to worry about.

When he went on duty, Adil was there at the fire-step, and with the cooling sun behind his head, shrinking red and dark, he seemed to have been sent from another time, another generation, and Toby felt again as though he was the ghost, and that Adil was something more than all of them, aeonian.

***

They hadn’t sent enough buses. He watched with Captain Jenrick as A and B companies squeezed onboard, falling onto each other’s laps, laughing, made safe by the alphabet.

“Bit of a muck-up,” said Jenrick.

Toby nodded. His men were sat on their packs, cigarette ends quivering like fireflies in the dusk.

“Nice night. I tell my wife, there’s nothing better than an English night in June.”

Coarse weeds poked through the ruins. Toby imagined their roots burrowing down to the Earth’s centre, furling around it, binding themselves. You might tear off the head, but another, stronger, would grow in its place. The poison had sunk too deep. In a hundred years, some old boy in his garden would try digging them out, and would turn up bones.

“It’s a bloody farce,” he said quietly to Green. “If the German artillery knew we were here, they’d have a field day.”

Adil was with his mates, playing cards again. Toby turned away restlessly. He badly wanted a drink. What were the base playing at, only sending two buses? If there was no dinner for the men when they arrived, he was going to lose his temper. He paced the perimeter of the Cloth Hall, as though stitching a protective thread around them all, all of them bored, hungry, making the best of it, hating the open, exposed feeling. When he looked at his wristwatch, nearly two hours had gone by.

“We could’ve walked it by now.”

“If you say so.” Jenrick gave him a peppermint. “Can’t stand marching in the dark. Almost broke my nose once tripping over a dead mule. Ah, here we are!”

He raised his swagger-stick in the air, like a flare pistol, and two round jaundiced eyes blinked from across the felled town. The 28 to Westbourne Park lurched towards them. The men cheered wearily.

“Where’s your friend?” Jenrick asked the driver.

“Blown radiator. They all had to get out and walk the last mile. So it’s just me, I’m afraid, sirs.”

Toby had to step away. Behind him, Green and D Company’s sergeant-major were getting the men to their feet, calling the roll, checking for forgotten kit. The incompetence, the poor management, the dearth of resources, the lack of consideration, the recklessness of leaving four hundred exhausted men in a dead, barren place with no cover… They couldn’t keep rubbing in the salt and expecting him to bear it.

“Breathe. Please, for me.”

Adil touched his elbow.

“Slowly in and out.”

“ _One bus_ – ”

“I know. In and out.”

“They may as well turn our own guns around and shell us themselves.”

“No-one’s going to shell us. Nice and slow for me. Good.”

“I need – I can’t leave Jenrick to sort this. Make sure you get on. Don’t go being gallant.”

“Listen,” Jenrick said, when Toby suggested flipping a coin, “take your chaps back and we’ll wait. You _are_ next in the alphabet.”

“To hell with the alphabet.”

“You’ve got the wind up, Hamilton,” Jenrick said matter-of-factly, “and I don’t mind the open air. Makes a nice change. You can buy me a drink in the mess when I get back.”

Green and Woody got the men onto the bus, packs and crates piled in the aisles. Toby stood at the back, holding onto the pole, looking down at the road unravelling beneath the wheels. He thought about Jenrick and his dead mule, going arse over tit in the dark in front of his men, and dining out on the story for the rest of the war. He realised he was laughing, high, wheezy, drowned by the engine, face wet. Jenrick was too brave for his own good. If he was cleverer he couldn’t have won his DCO.

It was gone eleven when they reached the base. Toby gave the driver a packet of cigarettes, and the bus turned around and went back out into the night, headlamps flickering sleepily. He saw Adil’s dark head in the crowd moving off to the men’s canteen. He walked silently with the others to the mess, where their dinner had been kept under warming-lamps. Tough mutton stew, the vegetables decomposing, spots of grease glistening on the surface. Toby put a pound note behind the bar, and told the mess sergeant to bring Jenrick and his officers whatever they wanted when they got in.

In hut three, the bed had been stripped. Just the grubby, springless mattress and a pillow without a case. Toby lay with his head the wrong way up. He imagined the three officers who’d slept here since him, not knowing that here Adil had undressed him, brushed the hair from his neck, been kissed. It was a large bed for one. He drowsed, coming to now and again as the points of his uniform pinched him. He could die here, knowing Adil was safe in the canteen.

When he came in, he closed the door quietly, as though he thought Toby was asleep. He sat on the edge of the bed and touched his forehead.

“You’re very warm.”

“It’s this room. No air. Did you get some dinner?”

“Yes. Everyone’s alright. Did you?”

“It didn’t look edible. I think we’re the only company to eat better in the line than in the mess.”

“I’ll get you something.”

“No – ” Toby caught his sleeve. “I’m sorry, I know it’s late. Five minutes?”

“I’m going to have to punch another hole in this,” Adil said when he unbuckled Toby’s belt.

Toby undressed to his vest and breeches, and Adil took off his own boots and belt. They got back on the bed, the wrong way up again. Toby reached out and slipped his hand into the warm space between Adil’s tunic and his collarbone. His ring would be cold against Adil’s skin.

“No-one will come. I told them I was going to bed.”

Adil leant in to him slowly, their noses touching. Toby stroked the hair at the back of his neck.

“I couldn’t stop thinking I was going to lose you.”

“Look. I’m alright.”

Toby opened his eyes.

“See? I’m fine.” Adil was smiling. “But you were that worried about me?”

“Oh, get away. It’s my job, isn’t it?”

Adil kissed him. He pulled a brace from Toby’s shoulder, trailing his fingers down his bare arm. Toby sat up slightly and pushed the other brace down, and then Adil was over him, and Toby cradled his face, the fragile shaping of the bone and the flesh, a face which couldn’t be allowed to be torn away.

“If I took you home to my mother,” Adil said, stroking over his ribs, “she wouldn’t let you leave until she’d fed you up.”

“I miss decent food. Fish and chips. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

Adil kissed his throat. Toby lay back, finding his hair again.

“Is this what you meant – when you said you’d take me to bed?”

It felt too lovely to be all Adil could want from him. The weight of him was like shelter.

“I meant – ” throat, jaw, mouth, parted lips, feeling too big for his skin, wanting Adil’s chest against his, against his back – “I meant whatever you’d like it to mean. Whatever I can give you.”

“Anything. Anything you want. Anything of me. Have it.”

He rolled Adil onto his back and touched the buttons of his tunic.

“Five minutes,” he said.

***

He was led through the dark entrance hall, the virgin princess returned, though not quite as virginal as before. The brigadier received him in the drawing room. The soldier-servant poured them both a sherry, then went out through the French windows into the grounds. A small group of them were beating carpets, hung on a line between two trees, puffs of dust mushrooming into the air like cold breath. Across the Channel their wives might be doing the same, a sunny afternoon like this. Thrashing the ash from the hearthrug as their children played on the cracked pavement in front of the tenement. One of them might mark their clothes, ruin their shoes, and have the beater turned on them in the absence of Father’s belt. There was no stretch in the separation allowance for anything new. At school he could always pick out the boys who caught it at home; they knew how to take it, didn’t squawk and cringe away as the cane sliced down. Silent. Regulated breaths. Gone somewhere else until it was done. At home Toby had pretended he was a secret agent, being tortured by the enemy; or a prisoner of war, held captive for information. Spies and soldiers had to be brave. Their suffering had a higher purpose. It was one of the things he knew he could do better than Freddie: take pain. It had almost made him feel special. People didn’t hurt people they didn’t love. Sometimes they loved them so much, pain was the only way to show it.

“We’re having the whole place spring-cleaned,” the brigadier said. “Major-General Markham came to visit last week and found cockroaches in his bedroom. Of course, we’ll have pulverised the blighters by the time _you_ ’ve joined us.”

“You see, sir – ”

“Be quiet, Hamilton. For once you’re going to do as you’re told. I offered you the job in February; you turned it down, as was your right, and left me floundering with Captain Dogby. Now Dogby’s going, so in three-and-a-half weeks you’re going to get off the bus at the base, put your pack and your batman into the car I send for you, and come and help me run this ruddy attack.”

“My batman, sir?”

“He impressed me at Theresa’s dinner. The fellows I’ve got here do their best, but I’ll be glad to have someone _trained_ for when the generals come. If you don’t care for him, you can always leave him in the kitchens and choose someone else.”

“No, I – I am pleased with him, sir. I just didn’t expect – I mean to say, it would be a big thing, for the both of us, coming out of the line. Especially now. I wouldn’t like to feel I was letting the men down.”

The brigadier handed him a newspaper: the _London Gazette_ , dated two days prior, folded open to the Army pages.

“I put you in for a promotion. I thought I’d wait to tell you until they’d printed it.”

Toby found it halfway down. _Major the Hon. Tobias E. Hamilton, MC and Bar, 2 nd R. Leics._ Nearly three years ago his name had appeared here, Second Lieutenant, newly commissioned, never having fired a shot except the blanks in the Officer Training Corps at school. Now he outranked Freddie. _Major_.

_Is that your boy I saw gazetted, Lawrence?_

_My son Toby. Youngest major in the history of his regiment. My finest achievement._

Major Hamilton. It sounded awfully grown-up. People expected majors to know what they were doing. He’d have to stride about the château with his swagger-stick, spurs clinking, brass gleaming, handing out orders, and the soldier-servants would refer to him simply as _the major_ , anonymised by the loftiness of his rank. He’d go soft on good food and hot water and beds with clean linen.

He handed back the newspaper. “I’m not sure I’ve earned it, sir.”

“Hamilton, I hope you won’t be this contrary when you’re working for me.”

“But Woodward – ”

“But, but, but. Woodward is safe as houses. And you’ve plenty of time to show him the ropes. Now, my batman, Fielding, will pop in later and sort your insignia. May as well send you back with the proper pips. So,” the brigadier said, sipping at his sherry, a cat with its cream, “are you going to put me out of my misery and take the damn job?”

When the car was brought round, he asked to be dropped close to his hut, but the path was empty, the men at rest. By now they would have seen the _Gazette_ in the mess. Woody would know his own name would be appearing there before long. _Captain Alexander J. M. Woodward_. He’d take it in his stride. He’d do well at it. Safe as houses. The men liked him. He was the sort of fellow one pictured when one thought of a company commander: blonde, athletic, straight out of _Boy’s Own_. And his Jill would be pleased. If he made it through the attack there’d be a baby Woody sown on his next leave.

“So it’s true,” Adil said, once he’d closed the door. He came over to the bed and touched the brass crown on Toby’s shoulder where the stars had been. “It’s all over the camp.”

“The Army’s worse than school for gossip.”

Adil kissed him, open-mouthed, hot. “I’m so proud of you.”

“You’re soft.”

“Does this mean I have to call you ‘major’ now?”

“‘Course not. ‘Sir’ is still perfectly adequate.”

After, they lay back on the bed, damp and warm beneath their uniforms, their scent on the air. Toby’s face pressed into Adil’s neck. He felt his fingers in the ends of his hair; it was growing out again.

“At this rate you’ll leapfrog the colonel.”

“It’s only a temporary commission. The colonel’s a regular.”

“One day I’ll teach you how to accept a compliment.”

Toby kissed his neck. “There’s something else. A while ago, the brigadier asked me to be his adjutant. I turned him down, but now he’s offered again, and with the promotion it seemed ungracious to say no.”

There was a tiny pause, and then Adil said, “You’ll be brilliant. I’m so pleased for you.”

The hand in his hair had stilled; it started up again quickly.

“You’re coming with me.”

“Toby, I can’t. They’ll expect you to pick a new batman from the staff at HQ.”

Toby struggled up onto one elbow. “The brigadier _wants_ you to come. He wants you to serve at his dinners. You’ll have a job for life if you can help him impress Major-General Markham.” He touched Adil’s face. “I’d never have accepted if you couldn’t come too.”

Adil looked strange, the calm, blank face slackened, and Toby wondered whether this was how he looked when no-one could see him, the tired, unsmiling mouth, the lines of the Somme scored at the corners of his eyes. Off-duty.

“Are you – are you angry? I’m sorry I couldn’t check with you first. He rather put me on the spot.”

“Of course I’m not angry.” He took Toby’s hand. “It’s a surprise.”

“A good one?”

“I’ve never let myself think about – being safe.”

“Please will you come? I’m not ordering you. Look.”

He climbed off the bed and knelt, bringing Adil’s hand to his mouth. “Please will you come and be safe with me?”

“Why did you turn it down?” Adil asked, once he’d pulled him back onto the bed, Toby’s heart chanting _safe safe safe_ as he kissed him. “You said he’d offered it to you before.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“It’s perfect for you.”

“So people keep saying.”

Toby lit a cigarette. He’d set off for headquarters before lunch, and by the time he’d got there the brigadier had already eaten. The heat did funny things to your insides. It stoppered your appetite, then all at once you felt so weak you could hardly bear the weight of your own head. He closed his eyes. Watching the smoke was dizzying him. He didn’t want to be a major. He didn’t want to go back into the line. Now that safety lay before them, he didn’t want to wait three-and-a-half weeks for it.

“It felt like cheating. Or shirking. Giving up. Ducking out before the end. Leaving the other chaps to finish the job because…”

He hesitated.

“Because I’ve lost my nerve. That’s what people will think.”

He heard Adil turn over, felt his forehead against his shoulder.

“No-one’s going to think that, Toby. In fact, I think they’ll be glad to know there’s someone at HQ who knows what it’s really like.”

“It’s what my father will think. He might be pleased about the promotion, but he’ll think I ought to stay in the thick of it. Like my brother.”

“Has your father ever been out here?”

“No. He’s with the Admiralty.”

“Then surely his opinion is irrelevant.”

“You don’t understand.” He opened his eyes. He was feeling sick again. “I only joined the bloody Army because I thought it would make him proud of me.”

“Of course he’ll be proud of you. You’re the youngest major – ”

“Not that again.” He turned onto his side. Looking down at the floor made him feel steadier. “Look, I’ve taken the job. I can’t go back on it now. There isn’t any point in talking about it anymore.”

He smoked, ash seeding the floor like spores. The mattress smelled like someone else. Tens, perhaps hundreds of officers had lain here. A tart’s bed. But, in her patriotic duty, she didn’t charge.

Adil breathed slowly behind him, like sleep. Strange, to lie like this with someone that in truth he knew nothing of; at least not the usual things he imagined one learnt about a lover. He had intimate knowledge of the state of Adil’s feet, how he cared for his rifle, but not the name of his sister. After that first time at the fire-step, they’d never spoken about Before-The-War. Those had been doll’s house lives, two little boys with painted hair at the front of their engines, who had somehow caught each other.

“I wasn’t the right sort of son for him,” Toby said. “My brother was exactly what he wanted. I was sensitive, I suppose, and he didn’t know what to do with me. Tried to toughen me up. I thought the war… I thought if I could win a few medals, he’d be able to introduce me as his son, _the war hero_.”

In picture-books war was always so clean. The soldiers looked as though they went home every night for their dinner and a wash. Uniforms gleaming scarlet and gold; sleek black riding boots; pink, whole faces; even the dead were artfully arranged on neatly-cropped green beneath cloudless blue, a bright yellow sun high over the victorious, over the Union Jack. He’d signed on for a short, tidy war in primary colours. This war was too dirty for picture-books.

“The last thing he said to me before I shipped out was that I was pathetic. That my life was useless.”

Adil’s hand was at his shoulder. “You’re going to fall off the bed.”

He took Toby’s cigarette and dropped it onto the floor, then pulled him against his chest.

“Get off,” Toby said, putting his arms around him.

“You are not pathetic, Major Hamilton, MC and Bar. Your life is not useless.”

“But if he thinks that now, what will he think of me once he hears I’ve slunk behind the lines?”

“You aren’t going there on holiday, Toby. Is he why you don’t go home for your leave?”

Toby pulled back. “How do you know that?”

“Robbie told me. He said you bring ingredients back for him from Paris.”

“I suppose you’re a good boy and go home to Mother when it’s your turn.”

“Only place I’ll get proper food.”

Toby found his neck again, kissing at it. He could feel Adil’s pulse.

“They gave me a week after Loos. The battalion had been pretty smashed-up and they couldn’t send us back into the line until the new draft arrived. When the train stopped in Paris on the way to Calais, I just got off. No plan. Wired my mother and said I couldn’t get a boat. I just walked about all day, slept on benches at night. Spent all my cash on chocolate for the men. I couldn’t have faced my father in that state. Now I suppose I’ve left it too long. I wouldn’t know how to speak to any of them.”

They were less real to him than the dead. They belonged to a life that was finished for him now. Loos had weaned him. The jaws of the wire. He belonged to the mud and the chalk and the clay.

“We’ll take your next leave together,” Adil said. “You can show me Paris.”

“We’ll get hotel rooms next to each other. With an adjoining door.”

“I’ll get some food in you.”

“I’ll draw you a bath and wash your hair.”

“We’ll take off our clothes in front of the fire, so I can see all of you.”

“So for Christ’s sake,” Toby said, “keep your head down for the next three-and-a-half weeks.”

He could see the flames on their skin. He would kneel on the hearthrug, finally permitted to worship.

**V.**

Toby had never dared to think about After-The-War, in case God thought he was getting cocky; but since Adil he’d found himself imagining small, secret things. Being woken by his mouth on his bare shoulder. Reading out something amusing in the newspaper over breakfast. Taking him to dinner and a show. When the dreams got too big – a home, a life – he found himself tapping the wooden table leg, or the bedframe, or a strut in the trench. The line made them all superstitious. Bad luck in threes. One for sorrow. Red sky in the morning. Everyone had lucky charms and talismans: a tiny doll, a handkerchief, a scrap of ribbon, a cross on a chain. A signet ring. Not even the inside of his head felt safe. God would see it all, and take steps.

The men seemed delighted by his promotion. Grins as he passed them in the trench. No longer simply _morning, sir_ or _‘scuse me, sir_ but major, major, major. There were no other majors in this part of the line. It seemed to give them a feeling of superiority, of safety. Protected by the glow of rank. There could be no suicide missions sent down from top brass now. They wouldn’t want to risk a _major_.

“Perhaps I ought to grow a moustache,” Toby said, looking into the back of a spoon. “Conform to type.”

Behind him, Adil traced one of the brass crowns, ostensibly rubbing away a mark.

“I don’t think I could allow it, sir.”

“Oh?”

“For your own good, sir.”

Toby looked round at him.

“The brigadier did say I should take you in hand, sir.”

“I was joking.”

Adil’s hand moved across his collar, thumb brushing his throat. “No, you weren’t,” he said.

Toby had only told Adil, Woody and Green about the adjutancy. No need to make a meal of things and embarrass the men. He’d slip away quietly in the brigadier’s car, then send them all some chocolate on his next leave. They liked Woody. He knew how to speak to them. They’d feel safe with him in the attack. He still had plenty of nerve left; perhaps more than Toby had ever had to begin with.

They moved up into the front line on the first of July, through narrow, twisting capillaries of communication trenches, single file, necks scarlet, the baked earth cracked and splitting. They were relieving Captain Wayman’s company again, but when Toby and Woody went down into the dugout, heat stinging their eyes, they found Lieutenant Perry, the second-in-command, waiting for them.

“Haven’t you heard?” Perry said gloomily. “Got knocked down by a bicycle on his leave. Lost two fingers. Permanent home service. Some chaps have all the luck.”

“Which fingers?”

“Does it matter?”

“I should think it does to Wayman.”

“How’s the wire?” asked Toby. His head was throbbing, a heavy, rubbery pain.

“All in order. These Boche like to keep to themselves. Don’t bother them, they don’t bother you.”

Logbook. Maps. Ammunition lists. The shuffle of feet on the duckboards. Too hot to smoke. The heat of the day trapped inside their uniforms, fraying tempers. Food already going bad in the mess box. Water being rationed. And everywhere a yellow, cloying smell, as in No Man’s Land old flesh bloated and burst in the sun. He spread his burnt lips with white zinc cream, so against his tanned face they looked as though they’d had the colour bled from them.

“Who’ve you been kissing, sir?” called Taylor when he went on duty.

“I saw a girl in a show like that,” said Hill. “The White Widow. No older than you, sir, but white all over, even her hair. Said she just woke up like that the day the Archduke was killed. Like a premonition. Only thing dark was her eyes. Said they went black the day her husband was killed. Said if you look into them for too long, you’ll go completely grey within the month.”

“I reckon she saw you coming, mate.”

There was no shade in the trench. They were worms, beached on a path, cooking. He’d had three whiskies since the handover. His mother’s bottle was long finished, left behind in the support trenches with a candle in its neck. He’d missed lunch to supervise the packing up. It felt as though a key had been driven behind his eye and was being continually rotated. He was dirty. They all stank. All unshaven and greasy-haired and crawling with smug, full-bellied lice. His lips were swollen and splitting. They would keep him awake tonight. The dugout was a furnace. The wretched sun wouldn’t go down for two hours or more. Adil was down there now, picking at his dinner.

He couldn’t meet anyone’s eye. He wanted a dry shirt. He wanted ice for his lips. He wanted water which didn’t taste of chloride of lime. His ears buzzed and rang, as though he’d been smacked. An itching, burning, muddled feeling, too much body, not enough skin. He’d had measles badly as a child, so badly his parents had sat up with him all night until the fever broke. He’d wanted to be very brave. It was easier to be brave when you were young. Children were too clever to think about what might happen next. He’d been less frightened of dying than of getting upset and making his father angry. Freddie had been sent to Aunt Penelope, their mother’s sister. Aunt Penelope was a suffragette. She wrote pamphlets. She’d smashed a window at Harrods. When she’d been sent to prison, he and Freddie and their mother hadn’t been allowed to see her anymore. That night he’d had his parents all to himself. Toby’s turn. One on either side of the bed, holding his sweaty hands. Guarding, in case Death came to try to snatch him away.

The wire seemed very far away. He couldn’t see where it ended and the German line began. He put his foot on a peg in the wall. All in order, Perry had said. Perry had just wanted to get going. He raised his head above the parapet. A desert: arid, dunes flattened, sun-bleached, glowing gold, the flash of dead men’s watches.

There were hands at his back. He couldn’t take his own weight. Someone half-broke his fall. The buzzing had thickened. It was too hot to be touched. His face was on the ground, yet he could see the Very lights, very close tonight, bursting white and floating. He tasted blood from his tongue.

Someone rolled him onto his back and slapped his face.

“Look lively, skip.”

They were getting him up, half-dragging him along the trench. Blurred faces he couldn’t recognise, mouths moving soundlessly. The Very lights were still going up, even though the sun hadn’t gone down. He hadn’t got a proper look at the wire. He tried to stop, turn back, but they pulled him on.

“Help me get him down. He’s a bag of bones but it’s all dead weight.”

Dark. Hot. His hands slipped on the ladder. People grabbing at him. Too much noise.

“Has he been hit?”

“No. Touch of heatstroke.”

“Put him down here.”

“I found him trying to give the Boche target practice.”

“Give him some water.”

“He ought to have some food.”

“What’s happened to his mouth?”

“Should we get his kit off, cool him down a bit?”

“Shall I call the stretcher-bearers, sir?”

Toby raised his head, but the pain spiked behind his eye, driving to the back of his skull, and he turned onto his side and retched.

“Joshi, get him undressed and cleaned up. Netherby, go up and I’ll send Gower to relieve you at nine. Tell Green what’s happened. And ask a runner to fetch the doctor from company HQ.”

He tried to get up, but someone pushed down on his chest and held him there.

“Keep still. Or you’ll get a real slap, you bloody menace.”

He felt Woody move away, and then Adil was beside him. A damp cloth touched his lips, cleaning away the blood and zinc and bile. They felt stretched tight and puffy, as though they’d been stung. Petroleum jelly was rubbed into them, generously, right to the cracked corners of his mouth. Adil washed his face, then he and Woody undressed him to his vest and breeches.

“He’s burning up, sir.”

Water was held to his mouth, and his lips were dabbed dry again, jelly reapplied. For a brief moment, a hand rested on his hair. He closed his eyes. The pain was dulling. He wanted to lay his head in Adil’s lap.

He croaked, “Who’s on duty?”

“Don’t worry about that, sir.”

“I couldn’t see the wire.”

“Shut up, skip. You can lie there and think about what a nuisance you’ve been.”

Gower had gone up by the time the doctor came. He lifted one eyelid, then the other, then took his temperature. He spoke to Woody in a low voice at the end of the bed. Adil gave him more water and two white tablets.

“I need to go up.”

They all started speaking then, a rising, angry sound like the high explosives. He needed his clothes. Adil was pulled away as he reached for him. He needed Adil to help him. He couldn’t do all those buttons on his own. No-one was listening. They were going to come through the wire. He didn’t trust Perry. Great gaping holes. Jerry would wriggle through and hurl grenades down the throat of the dugout. It happened all the time. There wouldn’t be enough left of them to bury. They couldn’t expect him to stay in bed without knowing for sure that the wire was alright.

Woody’s face swam above him, arm pressing down hard on his shoulders, and he felt the needle.

***

His mouth was wet. Something, cloth, over it. Fingers pressing down lightly. Robert Kingsley-Browne. He’d sensed, as another phobic can, Toby’s hatred of the dark. He’d grab him in the night, hand clamping tightly so the housemaster wouldn’t hear the scream, trying to make him wet the bed. Bedwetters got six with the hairbrush. Twin purple bruises. He’d never managed it. Toby never drank the evening milk. He’d pinched his wrist once, and Robert’s free hand had landed hard in his stomach. At the start of a new term, Robert’s ribs were always yellow-green when they changed for bed. Always falling out of trees, he said. Toby had almost been jealous. One could show off about bruises; war wounds, bravely won. There was only shame in the welts on the backs of his own legs.

The cloth was lifted. Now the jelly. His lips throbbed. He let his eyes half-open. The dugout was dark. The candle must have burnt out.

“Am I on duty?”

Adil touched his cheek. “Two tablets. Doctor’s orders.”

The water was warm.

“Who’s on now?”

“It doesn’t matter. Come on, lie back – ”

He was on Woody’s bed. He turned his head; Netherby’s bed looked empty, there was no-one at the table, the other dugout and the tunnel were silent. The light was grey at the bottom of the curtain.

“Is it stand-to?”

“No, Toby, don’t get up. Everything’s alright. Quiet night. No trouble. Lieutenant Woodward even filled in the logbook. He’ll be down soon and he can tell you all about it.”

The pain in his head was blinding him. He had to go up. He’d feel better in the air. The men expected to see him at stand-to. He had to speak to the sentries. He was the company commander. Adil couldn’t think he would stay down here, swinging the lead. He needed to organise a wiring party.

Hands on his neck, face, shoulders, as though he were a spooked horse. Cold sweat. He felt his teeth chattering. Adil’s arms came around him, half-hugging, half-restraining.

“Everything’s under control, Toby. Everyone’s alright. The sooner you rest, the sooner you can go up and see for yourself.”

Something more was going to happen. Bad luck came in threes. The Boche always knew when an attack was pending. Their planes saw the ammunition piling up behind the _pavé_. They were quiet now, a hundred yards over, because they were waiting for the strike; but they would be losing patience. And there were another six days.

In the trench above them, they heard Green call stand-down.

“Don’t let them send me down the line.”

Adil pushed Toby’s hair back. “Let’s see how you are after breakfast. You’re still very warm.”

“I won’t go. They’ll send me home. I’d sooner go over. I can’t go before the job’s done.”

Adil opened his mouth, but they heard the others at the top of the ladder and he stepped away. He looked as though he hadn’t slept.

They climbed down quietly, as though into a sick-room.

“How’s the patient?” Woody asked Adil.

“He can speak for himself. Why didn’t you wake me when you went up?”

“You didn’t miss anything,” said Netherby. “Crikey, it’s roasting down here already.”

Robbie brought out coffee. Toby felt foolish, lying half-dressed on someone else’s bed.

“Splash some whisky in mine,” he said. “That’ll fix me up.”

He got up gingerly, heavy and clumsy with hunger. Adil made an aborted step towards him. His coffee was passed to him and he scalded his mouth. His vest was sticking to his back. He wished everyone would stop moving about. Human beings oughtn’t to live like this, clambering over each other like rats. Brown. Khaki. White. Black. Everything had lost shape. The heat was melting them all away.

“Langham on duty now?” He gripped the edge of the table as he sat down. “I’ll go on at seven.”

“Better get some more kip,” Woody said. “You look rotten.”

“Fresh air will sort me out.”

He saw Gower and Netherby glance at each other. Adil helped Robbie bring out bacon, tinned sardines and the loaf and jam, then had no choice but to retreat into the tunnel. Toby chewed and chewed but he couldn’t break it up in his mouth. No taste. No smell. Tough, like raw meat. He felt like those bedraggled scavenger birds on the banks of the Thames, picking at wood and litter, trying to line the stomach. He poured whisky neat into his mug. Let them bloody look.

“Joshi said it was a quiet night.”

“Quiet for us,” Woody said. “Bit of gunfire on the right, across from D Company. Must’ve had a patrol out and run into trouble.”

“Well, I want to get up a wiring party for tonight. I’m not going to rely on Perry.”

“Just inspecting our own wire?” asked Gower. “I don’t mind leading it. I can’t sleep in this heat anyway.”

“Have some more bacon, skip.”

Toby pulled himself up. “I’m going to ask Green about volunteers.”

“Call a runner. Or Joshi can do it.”

“Joshi’s been up all night.”

“You can’t go up like that.”

Toby was reaching the edge of his temper. “Like what?”

Woody’s pale hair was dark with sweat. He stood up, and for once Toby felt the two years that separated them, the living Woody had crammed into them, the weight of the band on his finger.

“You’re cracked, Hamilton. You’re pretty well done-in and you can’t even see it. Or you just can’t face it. What’ll the brigadier say when he realises his new adjutant is a paranoid alcoholic who can’t eat a square meal? The state you were in yesterday, you nearly got your head sniped off.”

A shocked, nasty little silence.

“I don’t see how it matters to you,” Toby said, once he’d found his voice again. “You’ll be commanding the company either way. As you’ve been _longing_ for.”

Woody laughed. “My God. You’ve got a funny way of seeing things.”

Gower was looking down at the table. Netherby’s head swivelled between them, mouth a stunned little round. In the tunnel, the servants and signallers would be straining to catch every word.

“I’m going to dress,” Toby said, turning away.

“I suppose it’s never occurred to you that after a year together, I might not want to see you go west? _I_ saved your neck yesterday, not that I’ve had any thanks for it – ”

“I’m still your commanding officer, Woodward. Unless you want to be written up for insubordination, I suggest we leave it there.”

He went through to his own dugout, where Adil had laid out his uniform on the bed. The shine on the buttons followed him accusingly, like narrowed eyes. He hated scenes. But Woody had started it, he reminded himself, yanking on his shirt; if you wanted a quiet life in the Army, you kept your mouth shut. He’d never quite managed that at home. Or at school. But war had made him grow up.

“Message from Colonel Bartlett, sir. He’s coming to see you at ten.”

A touch at his wrist.

“Well, that’s all we bloody need. I don’t suppose he said why? I don’t know why we bother with field-telephones – we’d have more luck with pigeons.”

Adil buttoned up his shirt. “I wish you’d stay down here,” he said against his hair.

“Can’t now, can I? Not after that little performance.”

Woody was asleep when Toby went on duty, curled on his side like a child. In the trench, the sun was low behind their heads, pale fingers reaching for the German line, touching the faces of the dead. The men asked after him, hoped he was feeling better. So they hadn’t heard yet. By lunchtime the story would be spun into fisticuffs, or one of them brandishing their revolver. A secret in the line wasn’t kept for long; either the secret-keeper grew bored of the same stale gossip, or he was killed and it no longer mattered.

He’d sent Adil to bed. He stood alone by the fire-step, remembering how he’d looked that evening he’d asked him to be his batman: at ease, helmet pushed back, no shadow striped across his eyes. Of the earth, yet higher than it. Dirt seemed to fall away from him. Never cold, never hot. He was elemental. He loved without shame. The serenity of him; or the illusion of it. Sometimes Toby was frightened by it. He seemed complete. In need of no-one. There was so little that Toby could give him of any true value. He couldn’t picture him out of the line, in civilian clothes. They had both been born here, in Flanders fields, and any life before – home, school, The Victoria in Paddington – was prologue. This was the meat. If there was an after it could only be epilogue, post-script. They were no longer fully human, driven to exist beyond the point of human endurance. They would degenerate together, and the pain would be each other’s, until they met again and forever at the wire.

The sky was white with heat when the colonel arrived, an hour late, dusty from the roads. He dismissed the others briskly from the dugout and stood with Toby and Green in the gloom, patting his forehead with his handkerchief.

“Nasty business last night,” he said. “Very nasty indeed.”

“D Company’s patrol, sir?”

“It wasn’t a patrol. Captain Jenrick had a party out to cut a hole in the German wire, and they were spotted on their way back. All but one killed, including the officer. Young Nicholson.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” Toby said, suspecting he was about to be rather sorrier as the colonel mopped his brow again, looking uncomfortable.

“The brigadier wants to make a raid. That’s why the hole was cut. He wants to find out how much the Boche know about the upcoming attack. D Company were to go back over tonight and snatch a prisoner or two.”

“Do you want us to provide covering fire, sir?” Toby asked, though he knew well enough what the colonel wanted. God forbid they ask the Intelligence Corps to find anything out. Leave it all to the bloody infantry.

“D Company are down to three officers. I can’t send two over in a raid and leave Jenrick on his own if they’re hit. We’ve a French regiment on the right flank and they’ll have their own orders. You fellows are the next closest to the hole in the wire.”

“So we go out tonight.”

“This afternoon.”

“This _afternoon_ , sir?”

“Don’t parrot at me, Hamilton. After last night, the Boche may know the hole is there. If we wait until tonight, you’ll run smack into the party they send out to fix it.”

“But if they know the hole’s there, sir, they’ll be expecting us. They’ll keep machine-guns trained on the gap all day. It’s suicide.”

The colonel sat down at the table, mop mop mop with his handkerchief.

“Would you like a drink, sir?” asked Green.

“Better had. This heat – I feel I’m back in Southern Africa. Have one yourselves, both of you.”

Adil brought in the whisky and a tin of water. He poured out three mugs, blank-faced; Toby could see he was listening.

“If it’s got to be done,” he said, “we’ll cut our own hole tonight and strike tomorrow. Make them think we’ve given it up, then catch them unawares.”

“D Company cut a perfectly decent hole last night. Give me the map.”

It was an awkward route: rather than the customary straight-ahead dash, they’d be crossing diagonally to the wire opposite D Company, leaving them open to two sets of German guns. The ground would be treacherous with shell-holes, corpses, old equipment. They could give no covering fire for fear of striking their own men.

“Two o’clock, I think,” the colonel said. “When Jerry’s sleepy from his lunch.”

“Is there anyone in particular you’d like me to take with me, sir?”

“Don’t be silly, Hamilton,” the colonel said sharply. “You’re the company commander. You don’t go over except in an attack. Woodward can lead, with one of the juniors to grab a prisoner. What about Netherby? He’d get through the gap alright.”

“He’s only a kid, sir.”

“Exactly. Small. Quick. Plenty of puff. And ten men with them for cover. You’ll go along, won’t you, Joshi?”

Toby’s head jerked up. Adil had been hovering discreetly, awaiting dismissal. He looked as though he’d had the wind knocked out of him.

“Joshi isn’t well. Touch of heatstroke. I’m keeping him on light duties.”

The colonel laughed. “Heatstroke? He’s used to hotter climes than this. This is spring-like for India.”

“Joshi is from Paddington,” Toby said, but the colonel was rising, looking happier now that the unpleasantness was out of his hands.

“Will you find the volunteers, sergeant-major? Nice and agile. Good bomb-throwers.”

“Of course, sir.”

The colonel put on his helmet, wiped his hands on his handkerchief. He took up his swagger-stick.

“I think I’d better lead the raid, sir,” Toby said, and even to his own ears it sounded provocative, the sort of tone which usually got him a hiding. “In case there’s any trouble with the wire.”

The colonel was a large man, a cavalry man, and Toby found himself taking a step backwards as he strode around the table towards him.

“Now, listen to me,” he said, face very close, pink and glistening like raw steak, “if I hear you’ve gone over then the Germans will be the least of your concerns. Do you think I wouldn’t court-martial an officer? I’ve never seen a major in field punishment number one, but there’s a first time for everything. Lieutenant Woodward is leading this raid. You are staying here. Do you understand an order?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then _obey_.”

He stepped back expectantly. Toby held his gaze for as long as he dared, then saluted.

“You aren’t going,” he said, once Green had taken the colonel up into the trench.

“I don’t have a choice.”

“Don’t be such a bloody martyr. He has no right to decide who goes on a raid.”

“You can’t always have everything your own way.”

Adil put the cap back on the whisky bottle.

“Leave it.”

“You’ve had enough.”

“No,” Toby said, stung, “I mean – come and sit down.”

“Someone will come in.”

“I’m not letting you go on your own.”

“I won’t be on my own. I’ll be with Woodward and Netherby and – ”

“If it was the other way around, _you_ wouldn’t let me go without you.”

“Toby. You are what you are and I’m – what I am.”

It was said kindly, as though Toby would come to understand such things when he was older, and it only made him feel closer to stamping his foot and demanding Adil did as he was told.

“He won’t know. As long as the raid’s carried out, he won’t care who did it.”

“And what excuse will you give to Green?”

“To hell with Green. Why won’t you let me do this for you? Christ, Adil, everything you’ve done for _me_ …”

Even his smile was horribly kind. “You couldn’t have survived two years out here without some sense of self-preservation. Don’t abandon it now for me.”

“The colonel’s all talk! They’d never string up a major. And if they did, I’d willingly stay chained up, in the centre of the parade field, in this godawful heat, if it meant – ”

The others were coming back. Adil collected up the mugs and went into the empty tunnel, where Toby could not follow.

***

Woody and Netherby took it with good grace. Toby looked over the map with them, then they all went up into the trench and used the periscope to find the hole in the wire. It hardly looked big enough to fit two men through at a time.

“It’s your show,” Toby said quietly, “but I’d send Netherby and your best bomb-thrower through first, before Jerry realises what’s happening. Then the rest can come in behind, help get the prisoner out and provide cover.”

Woody gave him a cigarette. “D’you remember the first one of these we did together? You directing, me dashing in. Bloody arctic. I was almost glad of the run.”

“And when we staggered back with a prisoner apiece, Captain Ablett looked us over and said – ”

“ _Is that all?_ Miserable sod.”

“It’s the job.”

“ _You_ were miserable long before you became company commander.” Woody was grinning. “Going to write me up?”

Toby flushed. “Listen, I’m sorry about all that – and that business back in the mess – ”

Woody shook his head. “I was out of order this morning, skip. I’m sorry. And I want you to know, I never sought the colonel out to speak about you. I was never after your job. To be honest, I wish you weren’t going. Much rather take the orders than give them. Quieter life.”

“The men would follow you anywhere.”

“But all that paperwork…”

Lunch was quiet. Just the shuffling on the duckboards, and the tick of their wristwatches, newly synchronised. Netherby was very white. Not yet old enough to marry without his parents’ consent, Toby thought, but old enough for this. When Robbie came to clear, no-one had eaten much.

“Langham, take some lunch up to Gower,” Toby said. “You can stay on duty with him for a bit.”

He gave Netherby a cigarette, steadied the candle whilst he lit it. Netherby’s hands were shaking.

“I’ve left a letter with my things. In case the collection comes round while we’re gone.”

“Of course. But it won’t. You’ll be there and back in ten minutes. Now, this might’ve melted a bit,” he said, putting a bar of chocolate down in front of him, “so you’d better eat it up quickly.”

Woody sat beside him. “Let’s have another look at the map.”

Robbie brought in the rum ration. Netherby was trembling all over now. Toby couldn’t look at him.

“Has Joshi gone up, Robbie?”

“Just about to, sir.”

“Send him through to me, please.”

The candle by his bed had almost burnt out. When Adil arrived Toby kissed him hard, though it hurt his sore mouth, gripping his back, squeezing so they might become one flesh.

“I love you.”

He felt Adil’s face stretch beneath his hands.

“I love you too.”

Adil kissed him again, grasping him, holding him there, treasuring him.

“We have to go up.”

“You’re going to be alright.”

“Of course I am.” Adil pressed his face against his hair. “Of course I am.”

Toby watched him go out, back into the tunnel. Helmet. Gas mask. Empty pockets. Up the servants’ ladder into the trench. Toby followed half a minute later.

The heat hit him like a blow. It was the hottest part of the day, the air above No Man’s Land shimmering thickly. Green handed him the list. Atherton. Cowley. Evans. Fennessy. Joshi. O’Brien. Pym. Shortt. Taylor. Watson. All young. Light on their feet. Slim enough to wriggle two by two through the gap in the wire. Lined up single file, like prisoners awaiting judgement. Taylor, from his own platoon, was an excellent bomb-thrower. He would be the first through the wire with Netherby.

“Have they had their rum ration, sergeant-major?”

“Yes, sir.”

Toby moved along the line, shaking hands, trying to be encouraging.

“I don’t fancy this heat, sir,” said Fennessy.

“I think it goes in our favour. It’ll make the Boche sleepy. They won’t know what’s hit them.”

When he shook Adil’s hand, they said nothing. Toby squeezed his fingers. Adil smiled his small, friendly smile.

“Four minutes,” Woody said. He spoke close to Toby’s ear. “I’ve left my ring and a few things on the table. You’ll see they’re sent on?”

“Of course, but – ”

“And you’ll write to Jill?”

“Woody, you’re coming back.”

Woody stepped away. “Got your bombs? Respirators? Had a smoke? Let’s be having you then.”

The sap bulged out into No Man’s Land, beyond their own wire, a shallow gullet that swallowed each man as he wriggled over the lip of the parapet. Woody and Netherby first, revolvers in hand. Taylor. Fennessy. O’Brien. Adil looked back, searching for him, and Toby tried to smile for him, to remind him that it would be alright. Then Green was helping him over, and Toby heard his body slither across the dead ground, down into the sap, out of his hands.

One minute. The trench-mortars released the smoke bombs. They landed softly, like dropped eggs, and cracked so that dense grey smoke spread across No Man’s Land like split yolk. When the wire was cut directly opposite, a raiding party simply had to run forward blindly, trusting their officers to know the exact position of the gap; but now they had to travel cross-country, into a stretch of land unfamiliar to them, relying on old maps, old intelligence. They would attract fire on both flanks.

There was no wind. No birdsong. The earth was resting in the heat. Toby’s arms ached with the weight of the periscope. Their hands would be sweaty around their bombs. Netherby’s finger would be shaking on the trigger. Woody’s eyes would be straining through the smoke for the gap. Adil, in the middle of the group, tread light, keeping low, close to the man in front. The crunch of their boots on old bones.

An explosion. Taylor had thrown his first bomb. He and Netherby at least were through the wire. Shouts. Theirs or ours? He could see nothing. More explosions. More of them must be through. Netherby would be jumping down, grabbing the nearest German. He wasn’t a tall boy. The others would have to help them up and out. Shots. Single rounds. Revolvers. Theirs or ours? Cries. People hit. The smoke still lay thickly. The German gunners would be scrambling into their nests. Woody had to get them back through the wire before they opened fire. No more explosions. They had to be in retreat. The machine-guns were spitting now, incensed.

“They’ll never find their way back through this smoke.”

He ran to the sap and sent up a green flare. He heard them stumbling, hitting the ground. More cries. The machine-guns rattled like dice in a cup.

“There’s one, sir.”

Someone, head bent, was scrambling along the sap.

“Who’s that? Who’s there?”

A bloody hand gripped the parapet. Green seized the back of his tunic, hauled him over; he staggered on the duckboards, dirt on his face and neck.

“Where are the others?”

“I don’t know, sir.” Atherton was breathing hard. “Didn’t scrimp on the smoke, did they, sir?”

“Another coming in, sir,” said Green.

“Have you been hit, Atherton?”

“No, sir. Just that cut on my hand opened up again. Must’ve caught it on the wire.”

“Get along to the stretcher-bearers. They’ll patch you up for now.”

Fennessy was equally dirty, equally out of breath.

“You were right, sir,” he said, hands on his thighs. “Sat about sunning themselves. Like fat little dachshunds.”

“Where are the officers?”

“Lieutenant Netherby’s dead, sir. One of their officers got him as he was bundling out the prisoner. Right in the temple, sir. He wouldn’t have felt it.”

“Where’s the prisoner now?”

“I don’t know, sir – the smoke – ”

“One more – no, two more coming in, sir.”

Toby swung round; but it was Pym, pushing Cowley ahead of him. Cowley cried out as they heaved him over. The shoulder of his tunic was dark and wet.

“Where’s Lieutenant Woodward?”

“I don’t know, sir. He got back through the wire alright. He was the last one through. Then Cowley was hit and I lost sight, sir.”

“What about the prisoner?”

“Joshi.”

“What?”

He’d been too frightened to ask.

“What about Joshi?”

Cowley was leaning heavily on the wall, face grey and twisting beneath the dirt.

“Joshi had the prisoner, sir,” he said tightly. Blood seeped through his fingers, pressed against his shoulder. “Lieutenant Woodward went to help him.”

“Why help him? Had he been hit?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Green called the stretcher-bearers, and Cowley was carried away. The smoke was thinning, sunk low above the shell-holes. No movement. The German guns had paused; staring out, like he was, waiting. In desperation, Toby raised his flare pistol and fired again into the sky. It arced, fizzing, a burst of green sparks, like flecks on a clean canvas.

“Sir.”

Green beckoned him and handed him the periscope, pointing across to the border of D Company’s patch of No Man’s Land. A dark head flashed above the rim of a shell-hole.

“Could be someone wounded, sir.”

A blue-grey sleeve. Dark brown hair. Pale skin. Pulling himself out, collapsing face-down on the ground. And then –

“That’s an Austrian, sir.”

A rifle cracked.

“Hold your fire!” Toby roared. “Hold your fire!”

They crawled on their bellies, through the last of the smoke, their faces low. Down into the sap, the Austrian limping badly, sweat streaking tracks through the dirt on their cheeks. Green lifted them over, carefully, like children.

He was filthy. There was blood on his face and neck and hands and matting his hair. It glistened on his tunic buttons, red and gold, like the picture-books. He was clutching Woody’s revolver.

“Are you – ?”

“No. But Lieutenant Woodward is. Badly.”

He was whole. Untorn. Spared.

“Sir.”

Toby could hardly bear to look away from him, as though he was only beside him by force of imagination. The prisoner stood quietly, face set.

“Wie heißen sie?”

“Gefreiter Klein.”

“Bist du verletzt?” he asked, though it was obvious from the state of his leg. Klein nodded.

“Ich bin Major Hamilton. Wir bringen sie zu – ah – un hôpital?”

“Ein krankenhaus,” Green said. Toby glanced at him in surprise.

He took out his handkerchief and began to clean the blood from Adil’s hands. What did it matter if Green could see? War turned them all soft. He’d held the hands of dying men before. He’d pressed his palms to their wounds. He’d told them how well they’d done, how proud everyone was, how they were going to be alright, even as they choked on their own blood. He could be permitted to clean Adil’s hands, even though the blood was someone else’s.

“Where are the others?”

Adil shook his head. Evans. O’Brien. Shortt. Taylor. Watson. Taylor was only eighteen. First time out. And Netherby, rigid with terror, who’d jumped into the enemy trench and grabbed a prisoner anyway. He ought to be down from Cambridge on his summer vac. Writing sonnets to a Newnham girl.

Klein was loaded onto a stretcher, and Toby shook his hand before they carried him away.

“I can’t spare an officer for a prisoner escort,” he said to Green, “but the state he’s in, I doubt he’ll give much trouble. Send Corporal Feldman with this – ” he took the revolver from Adil’s hands – “and one other man. I don’t care who. We must telephone the colonel to tell him which hospital he’s going to. He’ll want to question him right away.”

“What about Lieutenant Woodward, sir?”

“I’m going out to get him.”

Green looked uneasy. “The colonel won’t like it, sir.”

“That’s the colonel’s affair. Mr Gower and Mr Langham have never brought wounded in. The men expect an officer to go.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Adil.

“No, you won’t. Get cleaned up and have a rest. You’ve done enough.”

“You can’t bring him in on your own, sir.”

“And I’m the only one who knows where he is.”

“So show me on the map and I can take someone else.”

“There isn’t time. I want to come with you. Sir.”

Toby rarely had patience for martyrs. More courage than sense, like Captain Jenrick. Adil needed a cup of tea and a sit down out of the sun.

“Send Atherton, Fennessy and Pym into the dugout to recover,” he said to Green. “Stand half the men to and rotate every two hours. Keep the gunners in the nests. I want everyone ready for possible retaliation. Put Mr Langham in temporary command. If we aren’t back by the first changeover, telephone company HQ and tell them we’re down to two officers. And ask Mr Netherby’s batman to ensure his letter is collected with the post.”

He turned to Adil, reckless with adrenaline. “I’m in your hands.”

Back over the parapet, creeping along the sap. Toby’s revolver was on its string, cool in his hand. A polite little breeze had got up. No smoke to cover them now. The sun would bounce off their helmets, flashing at the German sentries like a wink.

“How was he when you left him?”

“Conscious. He said he wasn’t in pain.”

“That’ll be the shock.”

“I put on a field dressing, but he told me to get Klein back.”

“Listen – ” they had reached the edge of the sap, crouching low – “out there I’m your commanding officer. If I tell you to run, you run. If I’m hit and you can get yourself back, you leave me. I need you to trust my judgement the way you trusted Woody’s, and not waste time being noble. Will you?”

Adil gripped his hand around the revolver.

The shell-hole was sixty yards away, a footprint of battles past. Out of the sap into No Man’s Land, lying flat on the scorched earth. If a plane passed overhead, they would blend with the dead. It was a straight course. They edged, pulling with elbows, pushing with knees, sun gripping the backs of their necks, blinking sweat out of their eyes, panting like dogs, swallowing the dust. Every few yards Adil touched his ankle. His belt buckle and buttons dug into his skin.

These were old dead. Flies, like black fur, feasted on old faces. Their uniforms would outlast them. Wristwatches. Wedding bands. The glint of a gold tooth in a sagging mouth. The stench caught in his throat. In half a year Taylor and Netherby would be unrecognisable. Death would erase them. Only their identity discs would give them a name, the proof they had ever had faces at all. There was no dignity in it. They had eaten their breakfast this morning not knowing they had only eight hours left.

Adil tapped his heel. Fifteen yards. Ten. They were breathing hard. It seemed impossible that Woody might still be alive. This was no place for living things. This was Fólkvangr, but defiled, forsaken by its goddess.

The shell-hole was wide and shallow, and Woody was almost lying flat, his head propped up just beneath the rim. His eyes were closed. He had bled through the field dressing; Toby could see the shattered ribcage through the shredded skin, expanding and contracting laboriously.

“Change the dressing. Use mine – ”

He tapped Woody’s white face.

“Alec. It’s Toby and Adil. You’re alright now. Can you hear me?”

Woody made a tight noise at the back of his throat.

“Sorry, sir, nearly done, sir – ”

“Adil got the prisoner back, Alec. Nice Austrian chap. The brigadier will be delighted.”

“Netherby – ”

“I know. Fennessy said it was quick. It’s alright.”

“Just a kid.”

“The stretcher-bearers are waiting for you. They’ll sort you out.”

Woody’s eyes fluttered. “I’m finished, skip.”

“A scratch like this? Jill won’t let you off fatherhood that easily, Alec.”

“He’s bleeding straight through it,” Adil said. It was running down his wrists, beneath his cuffs.

“Alright – I’ll take his good arm. You take his legs, we’ll lift him out, then if he – ”

A bell began to ring; high, frantic, uneven. For an absurd moment Toby thought it was the Parousia, and looked up, expecting to see the sky splitting, peeling back like torn paper, as though God had suddenly looked down and seen what was going on, the wastage of His children, the desecration, and was sending in His own angelic cavalry to put a stop to it. But the sky remained whole, and the sound was coming from behind them. A warning.

“Is that – ”

Toby raised his eyes above the rim of the shell-hole, towards the German line. A heavy yellow cloud, compact, thick like sulphur, close to the ground, as though the earth was expelling Man’s poison, rolling gently towards them, carried on the breeze.

“Gas.”

He ripped Woody’s mask from the pouch around his neck.

“I told him. I told Bartlett they’d retaliate and he wouldn’t bloody listen.”

He lifted Woody’s head, yanked the mask down with one hand, catching it on his nose, apologising, knowing he was jostling the wound. He fitted the breathing tube. _This_ was why they bothered with drill. You never knew when the bastards would try to catch you out. He pulled out his own mask.

“Where’s your respirator?”

Adil was slumped, watching him. His neck was empty.

“Came off in the raid,” he said.

He was trying to smile. At once, at last, Toby understood the calm, blank face, the sure hands, the ready smile. He wasn’t special. Neither of them were, and Adil had known it. They weren’t immune. Death hovered over their shoulders as surely it did Green’s and Feldman’s and Gower’s and Langham’s and Robbie’s, and every man’s. Adil was afraid, had always been. Perhaps, for a time, Toby had made his fear bearable. And now he was trying to smile, trying to convince Toby it would be alright, trying as ever to shield him. Yet there were still three men and two respirators.

“Put it on.”

“No.”

“That’s an order. I told you to trust me. Put it on.”

Adil’s eyes flicked down to it. He hesitated. Toby flung it at him. He took out his bloodied handkerchief. Adil was pulling on the mask, attaching the breathing tube. The terror hit him then, without Adil’s face to make him brave. The buttons of his flies slipped through his fingers. The smell of the gas was growing stronger. He wrenched his breeches open. He was dehydrated. He couldn’t swallow. It had to come. Christ, the number of times you wet yourself out here: fear, or nowhere to stop, or no time to stop. It had to come. And then it did, all that whisky, his hands shaking as he soaked the handkerchief. The gas was over them now, spilling down the sides of the shell-hole like mist; Toby shoved himself back in, pressing the handkerchief over his mouth and nose, clamping his eyes shut, as the gas got in through his ears, through the pores of the handkerchief, bleeding through his skin. Someone had put a match to him. He had no breath.

***

Robert Kingsley-Browne had been capable of real sadism. If he could’ve stripped Toby and blistered each stretch of naked skin on those hot water pipes, Toby had no doubt he would’ve done it, and enjoyed it. Pain was part of growing up. Men took it until they were big or strong or old enough to give it out. Robert only copied his father. Toby’s father only copied his own father. In another life, perhaps Toby himself would have struck his own son. A rite of manhood.

He’d gone away, quickly and without realising he was doing it, into that dark space within the hollow of his ribcage, where the pain was quiet and sterile, as though breaching limbs that were no longer attached to his body. He could stay there for ages, the length of a thrashing and longer. But someone was bringing him back. Smoothing his hair, gentle, speaking softly.

“Don’t open your eyes. Don’t speak. Just lie still for me.”

He couldn’t feel the handkerchief. The gas must have passed. They were lucky to be in a shallow shell-hole. In deep ones it hovered stagnant for days.

“Small breaths. Slow and small.”

A thick, gurgling sound, like a blocked drain, like a boot sucked into mud. His mouth was filling with liquid. He could feel it bubbling hot and foul up his throat. He was going to choke.

Once he’d begun to cough it up, he couldn’t stop. Heaving in air, still stinking of the gas, the pressure of the liquid building in his chest. It was like drowning.

“Small breaths. I know it’s hard. I know. Slow and small. That’s it. You’re doing so well.”

The back of his head rested against a thin body. Hands found the lighter in his pocket. A cigarette was placed between his lips. A click, another, then a hand rested on his chest, fingers spread. He could taste tobacco through the blood.

“Try not to make my hand move. Small breaths. Concentrate on the cigarette. Do you remember giving it to me, the night we met? I was going to give it to Hill, but then I thought I’d keep it. The others said you’d been out here two years with barely a scratch. I thought it might bring me luck. It’s looked after me, and now it’s going to look after you.”

Toby realised he was crying. Worse than the cane. Worse than the belt. Worse than the hot water pipes. He needed to go away again. He was being burnt from the inside out. Adil needed to let him go away.

He brought his hands up onto his stomach, clamping down on the cigarette. Every movement tightened his flooded chest, forcing more liquid up into his throat. He eased his signet ring off his finger and pressed it against Adil’s hand.

“No. You’re going to be alright. I trusted you, now you trust me.”

But he took it. He was kissing Toby’s hair. It was going to be alright. He’d done something useful with his pathetic little life. Now, at last, he could go away.

Not without seeing his face. He wanted to look again at the beautiful things in it. He opened his eyes, cloudy with blood, and saw a shower of red sparks, as Adil raised the flare pistol and fired into the white, Godless sky.

**VI.**

Rain had come to Loos three nights ago, and there had been hope – shameful, unspoken – that, like school cricket, it might be called off. But it cannot be called off. Christmas has come and gone. Over two hundred thousand already killed. The dwindling stock of professionals has been swelled by the reserves, the amateurs, the patriots, the _Boy’s Own_ enthusiasts. Well, the Royal Leicestershires are here now. They’ll take the job in hand. Their colours had flown at Waterloo. In their hearts they wear the scarlet and gold of their forebears. September 25th 1915 will be the greatest day in the history of the regiment.

Three minutes. Rain soaking through caps, shirt collars, the soles of boots mass-made on the cheap. Load up. Fix bayonets. The barrage like the roar of God, ordering the Germans to give it up, for He stands with the British. Revolver on its string. Watch dial fastened on the inside of his wrist, glass smudged with rain. Hands braced on the ladder. Whistle cold in his mouth. There can be no Germans left. They will cross No Man’s Land to find them splintered, ash and dust.

One minute. The barrage lifts. In the sudden quiet, blood wails in his ears. His platoon is lined up behind him, his to shepherd. Too wet for a last cigarette. Thirty seconds. To his right, Captain Bristow is focused on his watch. His moustache is plastered to his upper lip. Fifteen seconds. Ten. Bristow raises his head. Inhales. Five seconds. Then, along the line, over six miles of it, the whistles blow in a single, coercing scream.

Up. Slipping on the ladder. Scrambling through the pruned gaps in their own wire. Straining to wrench each foot out of the stinking, suckling mud, sunk in up to their shins. The earth is weeping. They skid, lose their balance, foals taking their first steps into warriorhood, but the German line is quiet. This is the final advance. Dig in. Occupy. The game is almost up.

The German wire, fifteen, twenty yards deep. A thicket of iron thorns, taller than a man. Uncut.

The guns begin. The concrete block house behind the German line flashes orange with the speed of the fire. Undamaged. He sees Captain Bristow die, a neat red circle in the centre of his forehead, face mildly surprised. He sees Corporal Green fall down, drive his bayonet into the ground, heave himself back up. They had been promised no survivors; enemy defences obliterated by the barrage, a direct, orderly advance through the holes blown by the artillery into the German wire. Dig in. Occupy. Falling back unthinkable. He sees the Leicestershires cut down, guzzled greedily by the mud. His brother officers hang on the wire, bunched like filings on a magnet around a kitten-sized gap.

He has lost his cap. Their blood drips hot onto his face as he lies, clipping methodically with his wire-cutters, mud in his mouth, nose, eyes. Their gunners cannot see him. The gap is widening. More men falling, but some are beside him now, tearing at the gap with their bare hands.

He spits. He blows his whistle. He gives the order, roaring over the guns, over the howls of the dying, the rain already washing the blood from his face.

***

His morning suit hung on the wardrobe door, ready for church. The tailor had had to take it in. Afterwards he would slip back upstairs, to the bottle of Jameson in his desk drawer. Leave them to their carols and charades, and when they came to fetch him for dinner, he’d be pretending to sleep, and they would leave him, quietly relieved.

They were running at capacity for the first time in four years. His mother had hired one of the fashionable new jazz bands, and every evening the trumpet and clarinet and drums called up through the floor, muffled, repetitive, like the ringing of a shelled ear. The singer had been a real find. She’d been touring air bases and convalescent homes with her accompanist, now the bandleader, entertaining the RFC. _Keep the Home Fires Burning_. By all accounts she kept a different fire burning each night of the week.

They’d become popular with the Bright Young Things. Second sons now only sons, now heirs. Girls with engagement rings but no wedding band. Childless young widows. They’d even launched a cocktail menu. The dowagers fled to the Savoy or the Berkeley, but the young people drank it in, these gifts of war. This was their world now. They were wiser, bolder, more cynical, and by God, were they going to bleed it dry. Six weeks ago some of them had even been in training, preparing to ship out; saved by the gleam in their fathers’ eyes. His story was already history to them.

He lay on his back. The fire threw ghosts across the ceiling. Nothing left but the dark to be frightened of. He spent most nights at the wire. Often Loos, except that when he looked up from his wire-cutters, the gas, like a foul breath, was withering them all, and this time he didn’t have a handkerchief. Sometimes, when he woke, he found he’d wet himself. Worse was when the dream became muddled with other things, and he woke to a different kind of nocturnal emission. He was twelve again, scrubbing at the sheets before Robert Kingsley-Browne could see, except now sex wasn’t something vague, inconvenient, faintly disgusting; it was violent, degrading. It was punishment. War had brutalised them. No pain, no threat, and there was no thrill. He revolted himself.

He was still in his dinner clothes. The tailor had had to take those in too. Even now he sometimes forgot to undress before bed. In the hospital he’d felt indecent in the regulation pyjamas. He’d get up in the nights, searching for his clothes, thinking he was late to go on duty, while the others shouted hoarsely – they were all gas cases – for more bombs, stretcher-bearers, steady on the left, hold the line. Most had been younger than him. When their parents visited, their fathers had held their hands as though they were still little boys. They’d died quietly. No breath left.

He ignored the knock. It was his mother, on her way to bed, seeing if he was awake. Sometimes she cracked open the door, and he would struggle to keep his eyes closed. There were scars in the wood where the lock had been. Doctor’s orders. A mere captain in the RAMC. He’d bloody outranked him.

She was coming in. He hoped she wouldn’t sit on the bed and stroke his hair. She’d be close enough to see his eyelids flickering. He evened out his breathing; dry, rasping, like tearing paper.

The mattress dipped at his feet. She touched his ankle. She must have already taken off her rings. She would scold him gently in the morning for having shoes on the bed, though it had been four years since they’d seen any dirt. She’d only shouted at him once since he’d been brought back, for falling asleep with a lit candle, and he’d startled them both by starting to cry, sudden as turning on a tap, and the doctor had had to come with his needle. His medals sat on the mantelpiece in her suite. He was ashamed to look at them; they’d been won by another boy, who was now dead. This shadow of him had no courage left.

“Hello, Toby.”

The shape was rising from the end of the bed, denser than the dark. No face. Flames behind him. He wasn’t in uniform; his shirt was too white. Toby groped for his glasses.

Tidy dark hair, that face, the smile. Dressed for dinner. He was a little broader. He looked tired, and it made him seem younger, like a sixth former, up late studying for the matriculation.

He’d been too ill to check the casualty lists when news was coming in from Passchendaele; and later too afraid to write, in case the letter was returned unopened with DECEASED stamped across the envelope. Like those women who refused to answer the door to the telegraph boys, as though not knowing might keep it from being true. But it didn’t matter now. He’d come for him. It couldn’t be lonely, where they were going, not with all the fellows who’d arrived before them. Woody. Netherby. Taylor. One generation-sized school outing. And he had Adil to guide him.

He hoped it had been quick, and that they’d been able to bury him. He hoped they’d give him a proper stone. If there had been pain, he hoped he hadn’t been alone.

He was closer now. Toby said, “I didn’t want you to die.”

He was frightened to touch him, in case he dissolved under his hands.

“Feel.”

He took Toby’s hand and pressed it against his chest.

“If I was haunting you, I’d have made a better entrance.”

He squeezed his hand, smiling. His skin was warm. Toby could feel the pulse in his fingers.

Toby turned his face to the pillow. It was cruel, to let him think it was over, then expect him to go on bearing it. He felt Adil get up, drop his hand. He had no words to stop him.

He was getting onto the other side of the bed, shoes and all. Toby’s arm was lifted from over his face.

“You’ll break your glasses.”

He took his hand again, stroking the grooves where the muscle had wasted.

“I was at the dentist when I found out you were here.”

He shouldn’t have come. He would know the extent of his disgrace.

“There was a piece in the _Mirror_ about the new Lord Hamilton’s engagement. I couldn’t believe it when I saw your name at the bottom of the page. Major Hamilton, MC and Bar, the socialite.”

Teasing again. Toby closed his eyes. He shouldn’t have come.

“I had to hire the clothes. I wasn’t sure I’d get in otherwise. I’ve been wandering around each floor, looking for a bellboy to bribe for your room number.”

“I thought you had come to fetch me.”

“Fetch you where?”

“Away.”

Adil smelt faintly of mothballs; a childhood smell, dressing up in Mother’s old clothes, hiding from Father in the wardrobe. His civilian clothes were still full of them. A hand found the ends of his hair. Checking the length.

After a while Toby raised his head. Adil straightened his glasses gently, ran a thumb across his cracked lips.

“They suit you.”

“My mother says I look bookish.”

“I like bookish boys. Well. One bookish boy.”

He had lost none of his charm. Perhaps some things, even in war, were still sacred.

“When did you get back?”

“Two weeks ago. Fully demobbed, thanks to the brigadier.”

“So you went to him after all. I hoped you would. I suppose it was awful?”

“It saved my life. Even when they were desperate for reinforcements, he wouldn’t let me go.” He smiled emptily. “Who’d have thought carrying trays was a reserved occupation.”

Toby touched his mouth to the back of his hand. “I was so afraid I’d ruined things for you.”

“Toby – you gave me your respirator. If I wasn’t so happy to see you, I’d still be furious with you.”

“I knew the trick. You didn’t.”

It kept him awake, what he would have done if he hadn’t known it – learnt from the old hands, who’d been caught out in early ‘15, when you were more likely to see an officer with a sword than a mask – and whether he would have made the same choice. Whether he still could now, knowing what it had done to him.

“You were bleeding from your _eyes_. I’ve never felt so helpless.”

“I’m not going to apologise.”

To Toby’s surprise, Adil laughed. “No. No, I didn’t think you would.”

He leant over him, and Toby waited, wanting him, forgetting he oughtn’t to want him anymore, wanting to be found by him. Adil was so close that his glasses were steaming up. He wanted to laugh.

Adil kissed him; as though Toby, second son, with his ruined body, the oxygen tank in the corner of the room, the black weight of his shame, was someone who deserved to be kissed, was equal to it, and as though somehow Adil had not allowed himself to doubt, in the year and more they’d been divided, that he would one day kiss him again. Perhaps Adil had kept him alive by the sheer force of his own conviction. Toby wanted to belong to him. He wanted to come home.

“Do you know,” he said, finding the warmth at the small of Adil’s back, “that my brother’s fiancée is Green’s daughter?”

“ _Sergeant-Major_ Green?”

“She’s a VAD. Freddie had a bad crash last winter, burns all over his legs and chest. And it seems love blossomed over the dressings trolley…”

“Well,” Adil said, which was all anyone could say when they were first told. “What’s she like?”

“Clever. Beautiful. Very capable. Much too good for Freddie. She used to be a receptionist at Claridge’s, so at least she understands what she’s getting into. They’ll marry in the spring.”

“Well,” Adil said again. And then, “I’m sorry about your father.”

Toby half-shrugged. “Heart failure. When he heard about Freddie’s crash.”

He’d been convalescing at an estate in Cornwall, where the sea air was supposed to do their lungs good. It was his mother he’d felt sorry for: newly widowed, two invalid sons, a convalescent home to run, and a hotel to keep standing through zeppelin raids with a skeleton staff. He’d seen his father once before his death; at the Royal Brompton Hospital in Chelsea, where the worst of the wheezers were sent. He’d stood at the end of the bed, as though gas damage might be catching, towering and impressive in his naval blues. He’d been visibly shocked by the state Toby was in, and Toby had taken a vindictive pleasure in it, at the thought of causing him a little pain, perhaps even a little pang of regret. It had been a short audience. _He’s terribly busy_ , his mother would say each week, arriving alone, and to his surprise Toby hadn’t minded. The will hadn’t even mentioned his name.

“Will you go back to the pub?”

“The brigadier’s asked me to stay on with him. Most of the male staff from his estate have been killed. I said I’d work Miss Buchanan’s wedding on New Year’s Eve and let him know then.”

“Who did they hook in the end?”

“Colonel Bartlett.”

Toby did laugh now, creakily, and Adil had to put his hand over his mouth, though he was laughing too, a little embarrassedly, as though he felt he’d been complicit simply by watching the catch take its bait.

“He’s old enough to be her father!”

“He has a niece, Susan, around her age. The brigadier said they’re going to train horses together.”

“And if you don’t stay on with him, or get poached by Bartlett,” asked Toby, “what will you do?”

Adil hesitated. “I don’t want to – presume.”

“I think that ship sailed when you kissed me under the brigadier’s dining table.”

Adil rolled onto his stomach. He began to loosen Toby’s bowtie.

“You’d go back to Oxford next September. I’d find work up there, pub, hotel. You’ll get a Double First, and I’ll have saved enough to set up as a spirits’ supplier. I’ll get contracts with several big hotels. Maybe this one. I’ll have an office with my name on the door – one with frosted glass and copper lettering. We’ll have a flat in London, in one of those white buildings with columns and steps up from the pavement, and somewhere in the country for the weekends. South-facing. By a river.”

“And what will I be doing, o breadwinner?”

“You’ll be eating three meals a day and giving up smoking and – ”

“ _Alright_.”

“You’ll be doing something clever and brilliant and letting me take care of you.”

Toby’s throat caught.

“It’s a nice dream,” he said.

He couldn’t go back to Oxford and walk amongst the children and the ghosts. His head was thick and stupid now. Adil needed someone who could match him. Toby had always been straining to keep up.

“You’ve got so thin,” Adil said against his throat.

The fire was low in the grate. Yelps of laughter in the corridor. Doors clicking shut. Life was going on. Tomorrow was Christmas Day. They would toast absent friends, lying alone in the dark across the Channel, the mud freezing over them. Theirs was the club of all clubs, one which he and Adil – by Fate, by luck – had been excluded from. They were amongst the last of their kin. The best of them had been lost. They could never join them again. They must find their own way ahead.

***

They lie on their backs, grass sharp, the water still and silvered like the flat of a coin. The pages are only half-proofed. He turns his head, watches a ladybird settle in the a of Chapter Twelve, flexing her wings in the sun. Christ, he’d like a cigarette. A gin and ice. How grown-up it all feels, this taking care of oneself.

Tomorrow they will go up on the eight-fifty, and Toby’s publishers will show him sample covers, and Adil will calmly investigate why the work on the new warehouse has fallen behind, and Toby will stop at Hamleys – his nephew wants a model of the Flying Scotsman, and Emma will say he’s spoiling him, and he’ll agree, and buy it anyway – and Adil will collect him from the Brompton after his appointment, and they’ll talk vaguely about seeing a play or dining out; but then Toby will run him a bath, and light a cigarette just as he hears him getting out, to make him lovely and cross, and after, once Toby’s shown how good he is really, they’ll call down to the restaurant – and hadn’t that been another of Toby’s clever ideas, taking a serviced flat – and have sandwiches on the hearthrug, the lamps blooming gold, the blood moving under their skin.

Now, Adil touches his wrist, signet ring winking on its chain, and asks whether he’s ready to go in.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've made it this far, thank you so much for reading, and do let me know what you think x


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